Answered Prayers by Truman Capote
But one had to have experienced Denny’s stranglehold, a pressure that brought the victim teasingly close to an ultimate slumber, to appreciate its allure. Denny was suited to only one role, The Beloved, for that was all he had ever been. So, except for his sporadic barterings with maritime trade, had this Watson been The Beloved, a besieged fellow whose conduct toward his admirers contained touches beyond De Sade (once Watson deliberately set forth on a sea voyage halfway round the world with an aristocratic, love-besotted young man whom he punished by never permitting a kiss or caress, though night after night they slept in the same narrow bed—that is, Mr. Watson slept while his perfectly decent but disintegrating friend twitched with insomnia and an aching scrotum).
Of course, as is true of most men sadistically streaked, Watson had paralleling masochistic impulses; but it took Denny, with his púttána’s instinct for an ashamed client’s unspoken needs, to divine this and act accordingly. Once the tables are turned, only a humiliator can appreciate humiliation’s sweeter edges: Watson was in love with Denny’s cruelty, for Watson was an artist recognizing the work of a superior artist, labors that left the quinine-elegant Mr. W. stretched in stark-awake comas of jealousy and delicious despair. The Beloved even used his drug addiction to sado-romantic advantage, for Watson, while forced to supply the money that supported a habit he deplored, was convinced that only his love and attention could rescue The Beloved from a heroin grave. When The Beloved truly desired a turn of the screw, he had merely to turn to his medicine chest.
Apparently it was concern for Denny’s welfare that led Watson to insist, in 1940, at the start of the German bombing, that Denny leave London and return to the United States—a journey Denny made chaperoned by Cyril Connolly’s American wife, Jean. The latter couple never met again—Jean Connolly, a bountiful, biological sort, passed out and on in the aftermath of a rollicking soldier-sailor-marine-marijuana-saturated Denny-Jean cross-country high-jinks hegira.
Denny spent the war years in California, several of them as a prisoner in a camp for conscientious objectors; but it was early on in the California days that he met Christopher Isherwood, who was working in Hollywood as a film scenarist. Here, quoting from the previously mentioned Isherwood novel, which I looked up at the public library this morning, is how he describes Denny (or Paul, as he calls him): “When I first set eyes on Paul, as he entered the restaurant, I remember I noticed his strangely erect walk; he seemed almost paralytic with tension. He was always slim, but then he looked boyishly skinny, and he was dressed like a boy in his teens, with an exaggerated air of innocence which he seemed to be daring us to challenge. His drab black suit, narrow-chested and without shoulder padding, clean white shirt and plain black tie, made him look as if he had just arrived in town from a strictly religious boarding school. His dressing so young didn’t strike me as ridiculous, because it went with his appearance. Yet, since I knew he was in his late twenties, this youthfulness itself had a slightly sinister effect, like something uncannily preserved.”
Seven years later, when I arrived to live at 33 rue du Bac, the address of a Left Bank apartment Peter Watson owned in Paris, the Denham Fouts I encountered there, though paler than his favorite ivory opium pipe, was not much changed from Herr Issyvoo’s California friend: he still looked vulnerably young, as though youth were a chemical solution in which Fouts was permanently incarcerated.
How was it, though, that P. B. Jones found himself in Paris, a guest in the high-ceilinged dusk of those shuttered, meandering rooms?
ONE MOMENT, PLEASE: I’M GOING downstairs to the showers. For the seventh day, Manhattan’s heat has hit ninety or higher.
Some of our establishment’s Christian satyrs shower so frequently and loiter so long they look like water-logged Kewpie dolls; but they are young and, by and large, well formed. However, the most obsessed of these hygienic sex fiends, and a relentless shuffle-shuffle hunter-haunter of the dormitory corridors as well, is an old guy nicknamed Gums. He limps, he’s blind in his left eye, a runny sore persists at the corner of his mouth, pock-marks pit his skin like some diabolic, pestilential tattoo. Just now he brushed his hand against my thigh, and I pretended not to notice; yet the touch created an irritating sensation, as though his fingers were splints of burning nettle.
ANSWERED PRAYERS HAD BEEN OUT several months when I received from Paris a terse note: “Dear Mr. Jones, Your stories are brilliant. So is Cecil Beaton’s portrait. Please join me here as my guest. Enclosed is a first-class passage aboard the Queen Elizabeth, sailing New York–LeHavre April 24. If you require a reference, ask Beaton: he is an old acquaintance. Sincerely, Denham Fouts.”
As I’ve said, I’d heard a lot about Mr. Fouts—enough to know it was not my literary style that had stimulated his daring missive but the photograph of me Beaton had taken for Boaty’s magazine and which I had used on the jacket of my book. Later, when I knew Denny, I understood what it was in that face that had so traumatized him he was ready to chance his invitation and underwrite it with a gift he could not afford—could not because he’d been deserted by a fed-to-the-teeth Peter Watson, was living in Watson’s Paris apartment on a day-to-day squatter’s-rights basis, and existing on scattered handouts from loyal friends and old, semi-blackmailed suitors. The photograph conveyed a notion of me altogether incorrect—a crystal lad, guileless, unsoiled, dewy, and sparkling as an April raindrop. Ho ho ho.
It never occurred to me not to go; nor did it occur to me to tell Alice Lee Langman I was going—she came home from the dentist to find I had packed and gone. I didn’t say good-bye to anybody, just left; I’m the type, and a type by no means rare, who might be your closest friend, a buddy you talked to every day, yet if one day you neglected to make contact, if you failed to telephone me, then that would be it, we’d never speak again, for I would never telephone you. I’ve known lizard-bloods like that and never understood them, even though I was one myself, Just left, yes: sailed at midnight, my heartbeat as raucous as the clanging gongs, the hoarsely hollering smokestacks. I remember watching Manhattan’s midnight shine flicker and darken through shivering streamers of confetti—lights I was not to see again for twelve years. And I remember, as I swayed my way down to a tourist-class cabin (having exchanged the first-class passage and pocketed the difference), I remember slipping in a mass of champagne vomit and dislocating my neck. Pity I didn’t break it.
When I think of Paris, it seems to me as romantic as a flooded pissoir, as tempting as a strangled nude floating in the Seine. Memories of it clear and blue, like scenes emerging between a windshield wiper’s languid erasures; and I see myself leaping puddles, for it is always winter and raining, or I see myself seated alone skimming Time on the deserted terrace of the Deux Magots, for it is also always a Sunday afternoon in August. I see myself waking in unheated hotel rooms, warped rooms undulating in a Pernod hangover. Across the city, across the bridges, walking down the lonesome vitrine-lined corridor that connects the two entrances of the Ritz hotel, waiting at the Ritz bar for a moneyed American face, cadging drinks there, then later at the Boeuf-sur-le-Toit and Brasserie Lipp, then sweating it out until daybreak in some whore-packed nigger-high grope joint blue with Gauloises bleu; and awake again in a tilted room swerving with corpse-eyed exuberance. Admittedly, my life was not that of a workaday native; but even the French can’t endure France. Or rather, they worship their country but despise their countrymen—unable, as they are, to forgive each other’s shared sins: suspicion, stinginess, envy, general meanness. When one has come to loathe a place, it is difficult to recall ever feeling differently. Yet for a wisp of time I held another view. I saw Paris as Denny wanted me to see it, and as he wished he himself still saw it.
(Alice Lee Langman had several nieces, and once the eldest of them, a polite young country girl named Daisy, who had never left Tennessee, visited New York. I groaned when she appeared; it meant my having to move out of Miss Langman’s apartment temporarily; worse, I had to cart Daisy around the city, show her the Rockettes, t
Me, I was Daisy in Paris. I spoke no French and never would have if it hadn’t been for Denny. He forced me to learn by refusing to speak anything else. Unless we were in bed; however, let me explain that, though he wanted us to share the same bed, his interest in me was romantic but not sexual; nor was he disposed toward anyone else; he said he hadn’t had his circle squared in two years, for opium and cocaine had castrated him. We often went to Champs-Élysées movies in the afternoon, and at some juncture he always, having begun slightly to sweat, hurried to the men’s room and dosed himself with drugs; in the evening he inhaled opium or sipped opium tea, a concoction he brewed by boiling in water the crusts of opium that had accumulated inside his pipe. But he was not a nodder; I never saw him drug-dazed or enfeebled.
Perhaps, at night’s end, with approaching daylight edging the drawn bedroom curtains, Denny might lapse a bit and carom off into a curvaceous, opaque outburst. “Tell me, boy, have you ever heard of Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café? Sound familiar? You betcher balls. Even if you never heard of it and maybe think it’s some after-hours Harlem dump, even so, you know it by some name, and of course you know what it is and where it is. Once I spent a year meditating in a California monastery. Under the super-supervision of His Holiness, the Right Reverend Mr. Gerald Heard. Looking for this … Meaningful Thing. This … God Thing. I did try. No man was ever more naked. Early to bed and early to rise, and prayer, prayer, no hooch, no smokes, I never even jacked off. And all that ever came of that putrid torture was … Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café. There it is: right where they throw you off at the end of the line. Just beyond the garbage dump. Watch your step: don’t step on the severed head. Now knock. Knock knock. Father Flanagan’s voice: ‘Who sent ya?’ Christ, for Christ’s sake, ya dumb mick. Inside … it’s … very … relaxing. Because there’s not a winner in the crowd. All derelicts, especially those potbellied babies with fat numbered accounts at Crédit Suisse. So you can really unpin your hair, Cinderella. And admit that what we have here is the drop-off. What a relief! Just to throw in the cards, order a Coke, and take a spin around the floor with an old friend like say that peachy twelve-year-old Hollywood kid who pulled a Boy Scout knife and robbed me of my very beautiful oval-shaped Cartier watch. The Nigger Queen Kosher Café! The cool green, restful as the grave, rock bottom! That’s why I drug: mere dry meditation isn’t enough to get me there, keep me there, keep me there, hidden and happy with Father Flanagan and his Outcast of Thousands, him and all the other yids, nigs, spiks, fags, dykes, dope fiends, and commies. Happy to be down there where you belong: Yassah, massuh! Except—the price is too high, I’m killing myself.” Then, scrapping the sleazy stand-up-comic tone: “I am, you know. But meeting you has made me change my mind. I wouldn’t object to living. Provided you lived with me, Jonesy. It means risking a cure; and it is a risk. I’ve done it once before. At a clinic in Vevey; and every night the mountains collapsed on me, and every morning I wanted to drown myself in Lac Léman. But if I did it, would you? We could go back to the States and buy a filling station. No, no foolin’. I’ve always wanted to run a filling station. Somewhere in Arizona. Or Nevada. Last Chance for Gas. It would be real quiet, and you could write stories. Basically, I’m pretty healthy. I’m a good cook, too.”
Denny offered me drugs, but I refused, and he never insisted, though once he said: “Scared?” Yes, but not of drugs; it was Denny’s derelict life that frightened me, and I wanted to emulate him not at all. Strange to remember, but I had preserved the faith: I thought of myself as a serious young man seriously gifted, not an opportunistic layabout, an emotional crook who had drilled Miss Langman till she geysered Guggenheims. I knew I was a bastard but forgave myself because, after all, I was a born bastard—a talented one whose sole obligation was to his talent. Despite the nightly upheavals, the brandy heartburns and wine-sour stomachs, I managed every day to turn out five or six pages of a novel; nothing must be allowed to disrupt that, and Denny was in that sense an ominous presence, a heavy passenger—I felt if I didn’t free myself that, like Sinbad and the burdensome Old Man, I’d have to cart Denny piggyback the rest of his life. Yet I liked him, at least I didn’t want to leave him while he was still uncontrollably narcotized.
So I told him to take the cure. But added: “Let’s not make promises. Afterward, you may want to throw yourself at the foot of the cross or end up scrubbing bedpans for Dr. Schweitzer. Or maybe that’s my destiny.” How optimistic I was in those sheltered days!—battling tsetse flies and scraping bedpans with my tongue would be honeyed nirvana compared to the sieges I’ve since withstood.
It was decided that Denny would travel alone to the clinic in Vevey. We said good-bye at the Gare de Lyon; he was somewhat high on something and looked, with his fresh-colored face—the face of a severe, avengeful angel—twenty years old. His rattling conversation ranged from filling stations to the fact that he had once visited Tibet. At the last Denny said, “If it goes wrong, please do this: destroy everything that’s mine. Burn all my clothes. My letters. I wouldn’t want Peter having the pleasure.”
We agreed not to communicate until Denny had left the clinic; then, presumably, we could meet for a holiday at one of the coastal villages near Naples—Positano or Ravello.
As I had no intention of doing so, or of seeing Denny again if it could be avoided, I moved out of the rue du Bac apartment and into a small room under the eaves of the Hotel Pont Royal. At the time the Pont Royal had a leathery little basement bar that was the favored swill bucket of haute Boheme’s fatbacks. Walleyed, pipe-sucking, pasty-hued Sartre and his spinsterish moll, De Beauvoir, were usually propped in a corner like an abandoned pair of ventriloquist’s dolls. I often saw Koestler there, never sober; an aggressive runt very free with his fists. And Camus—reedy, diffident in a razory way, a man with crisp brown hair, eyes liquid with life, and a troubled, perpetually listening expression: an approachable person. I knew that he was an editor at Gallimard, and one afternoon I introduced myself to him as an American writer who had published a book of short stories—would he read it, with the thought of Gallimard printing a translation? Later, Camus returned the copy I sent him, with a note saying that his English was insufficient to the task of passing judgment but that he felt I had an ability to create character and tension. “However, I find these stories too abrupt and unrealized. But if you should have other material, please let me see it.” Afterward, whenever I encountered Camus at the Pont Royal, and once at a Gallimard garden party that I gate-crashed, he always nodded and smiled encouragement.
Another customer of this bar, whom I met there and who was friendly enough, was the Vicomtesse Marie Laure de Noailles, esteemed poet, a saloniste who presided over a drawing room where the ectoplasmic presences of Proust and Reynaldo Hahn were at any moment expected to materialize, the eccentric spouse of a rich sports-minded Marseillais aristocrat, and an affectionate, perhaps undiscriminating, comrade of contemporary Julien Sorels: my slot machine exactly. Mais alors—another young American adventurer, Ned Rorem, had emptied that jackpot. Despite her defects—rippling jowls, bee-stung lips, and middle-parted coiffure that eerily duplicated Lautrec’s portrait of Oscar Wilde—one could see what Rorem saw in Marie Laure (an elegant roof over his head, someone to promote his melodies in the stratospheres of musical France), but the reverse does not hold. Rorem was from the Midwest, a Quaker queer—which is to say, a queer
Indeed, I am indebted to the Pont Royal bar for many acquaintances, including the premier American expatriate, Miss Natalie Barney, an heiress of independent mind and morals who had been domiciled in Paris more than sixty years.
For all those decades Miss Barney had lived in the same apartment, a suite of surprising rooms off a courtyard in the rue de l’Université. Stained-glass windows and stained-glass skylights—a tribute to Art Nouveau that would have sent good old Boaty into mad-dog delirium: Lalique lamps sculpted as bouquets of milky roses, medieval tables massed with photographs of friends framed in gold and tortoiseshell: Apollinaire, Proust, Gide, Picasso, Cocteau, Radiguet, Colette, Sarah Bernhardt, Stein and Toklas, Stravinsky, the queens of Spain and Belgium, Nadia Boulanger, Garbo in a snuggly pose with her old buddy Mercedes D’Acosta, and Djuna Barnes, the last a luscious pimiento-lipped redhead difficult to recognize as the surly author of Nightwood (and latter-day hermit-heroine of Patchin Place). Whatever her calendar age, which must have been eighty and more, Miss Barney, usually attired in virile grey flannel, looked a permanent, pearl-colored fifty. She enjoyed motoring and drove herself about in a canvas-topped emerald Bugatti—around the Bois or out to Versailles on pleasant afternoons. Occasionally, I was asked along, for Miss Barney enjoyed lecturing, and she felt I had much to learn.