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129 It was another telephone call to me in that office in Rockefeller Center that changed my life: The Academy of American Poets informed me that I had won the Lamont Award for Stand Up, Friend, With Me, and it would be published by Grove Press the following year. This, after it had gotten dozens of rejections from publishers. So in February 1963, Neil and I celebrated by going off to Europe, hoping to stay at least a couple of months. I’d be away when the book came out, but one advantage of being out of town was that Alfred documented his doings in his marvelous letters, beginning, that winter, with a dinner party where, though we couldn’t know it then, his fate was sealed. He was thirty-four years old, at the top of his form as a critic, and one of the darlings of the New York literary establishment. Paul Bowles, the author of The Sheltering Sky, a book that had eclipsed his reputation as a composer, was in New York writing 13 music for a Tennessee Williams play on Broadway, “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” when Alfred was invited to a friend’s apartment to meet him. Over dinner, Bowles spoke of the advantages of life in Morocco for a writer, and urged Alfred to come and see for himself. Our generation, Alfred included, was in awe of the famous expatriate , the resident guru of Tangier. In the late forties, we had been electrified by his short story, “Pages From Cold Point,” with its homosexual theme, that came out in a New Directions Annual and set off endless debates about whether the boy, who had gone around seducing all the men on a Caribbean island, actually seduced his own father as well at the story’s murky end (Bowles later confirmed to Alfred that he did). But even before that publication, we were aware of Bowles as a figure on the international arts scene, hobnobbing with the legendary Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, before, following their advice, he settled in Morocco. When he met Alfred in New York, Bowles was in his lowest period of creativity from the exhaustion of years of coping with his wife Jane Bowles’s psychological and physical problems. Her decline, through breakdowns, shock treatments, strokes, and alcoholism, is chronicled in painful detail in Millicent Dillon’s biography, A Little Original Sin. That winter in New York, Paul Bowles was in desperate need himself, and must have recognized in Alfred Chester a brilliance similar to his wife’s, the “food” his own creativity needed. For like Jane Bowles, Alfred was Jewish, homosexual, self-destructive, even masochistic, and also had a physical “defect”—her crippled leg, his hairlessness—that would allow Bowles to be the golden boy to their “monsters,” a withholding role he had played earlier to various men who were in love with him, like Aaron Copeland. The attraction between Alfred and Bowles was never sexual. A tall, dry stick of a man, though sexually active all his life, Bowles was a complete closet case, whose Moroccan lovers, in the eyes of the world, were able to pass as servants, and indeed he employed them. Now he seemed to need the stimulus of Alfred’s energies, as he had 130 131 once needed, and used, perhaps used up, his wife’s. After a successful career as a composer, he had shifted to fiction in the forties, psyching himself into writing stories by tuning in on Jane’s quirky craft, making it his own, and, as her infantile psyche probably interpreted it, taking writing away from her. Her difficult behavior, in the years of her decline after her writing became overshadowed by his, when she continually interrupted his sacrosanct writing schedule, might be seen as her only means of getting even, as well as a kind of “left-over life to kill,” when she was unable to write anymore. So perhaps another explanation for Bowles’s invitation to Alfred to come to Tangier was that he also saw him as a companion for his wife Jane, to look after her, amuse her, lighten the load on him that her mental illness had caused. Bowles always claimed that he never invited anyone to Morocco, yet after returning to Morocco that winter, he wrote again and again urging Alfred to come. But Alfred was playing hard to get, nervous about falling under Paul’s...

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