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17 In the meteoric rise of Susan Sontag’s literary career in the 1960s, little credit has been given to Alfred Chester, who was inseparably entwined in that period of her life. But for several years, their relationship was intense and complex, as all his relationships were. Before women discovered their sexuality, it used to be said that many of them were attracted to men more for their minds than for their bodies. And in the long run, perhaps it is still the stimulation of another mind that keeps any relationship going. Susan Sontag, no mean mind herself, is reported to have called Alfred Chester the most fascinating man in New York. If inadvertently she played a crucial role in his final crackup in 1965, the effect of these two unusual personalities on each other was instantaneous and powerful. It is remarkable that in the life of this shapeless, bewigged, oddlooking , pasty-faced, homosexual writer were a number of other beautiful and powerful women besides Sontag. I remember Alfred at a Passover seder he staged in his apartment in Greenwich Village, standing short, pale, and pudgy in his prayer shawl between the novelist Hortense Calisher, vivid as a geisha in her black wig, and 158 159 stunning Art Students League model Harriet Sohmers, both women six feet tall, as they said the prayer while lighting the candles of the menorah. After his mother, who was gypsyish and operatic in the style of Bizet’s Carmen, came Theodora Blum, a girl of opulent, maternal flesh, over whom Cynthia Ozick, a classmate at New York University , was moved to a jealous fit fifty years later, bad-mouthing her rival for Alfred in a memoir, “Alfred Chester’s Wig.” In this essay Ozick expresses a remarkable theory about Alfred’s homosexuality that dispensed with Freud and all the other deep thinkers Ozick usually pays tribute to. She recalls Alfred’s teenage crushes on women and, taking them at face value, is convinced that her adolescent refusal to kiss him goodbye after a date—a kiss that might have given him a foretaste of heterosexual pleasures—caused him in reaction to become homosexual, since it was the final proof that he was too ugly to attract a woman. Even if his friendship with the buxom Teddie, as Theodora Blum was called, was platonic, he was so obsessed with her that when he was living in Paris in the fifties he wrote letter after letter begging her to come to France, repeating that he was longing to lay his head on her voluminous breast. When she did answer his summons, finally, and the ship docked at Cherbourg, Alfred made a mad dash to get there ahead of a woman friend, equally eager to greet her. This reunion turned into a farce when, on Teddie’s arrival, both contenders spotted each other indignantly at the dock, and on the journey back to Paris on the boat train the two rivals for a nonplussed Teddie refused to speak to each other. After Teddie got a look at the squalor of the cottage on the outskirts of Paris that Alfred expected her to share with him, his lover Arthur, and their dogs and cats, she wisely insisted on moving into a hotel. Alfred became furious, and his obsession with Theodora Blum waned. During his decade in Europe in the fifties, he dazzled the Princess Marguerite Caetani, another large, imposing woman, who invited him to her husband’s opulent estate at Nympha, outside of Naples, where they had lunch in a garden among marble ruins overgrown with tangled vines, as the bored Prince, Alfred told me, sat there swatting flies. For awhile Caetani even used Alfred as her literary advisor, until rival American novelist and poet Eugene Walters wormed his way into her confidence and beat out the competition to gain supremacy over her. It was also in Paris that Alfred Chester met the boyishly slim, towering Harriet Sohmers, who was hawking the Herald Tribune in the streets, the inspiration, perhaps, for the Jean Seberg character in Godard’s “Breathless.” Harriet was a dead ringer for Prince Valiant with her large, handsome features and straight brown hair with bangs. Unlike many tall women whose unusual height was a curse that led to permanent round shoulders as they tried to stoop to the level of those shorter than they, Harriet seemed to enjoy the theatricality of her appearance, and strode dramatically around with immense confidence, attracting everybody’s...

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