Looking for Genet: Literary Essays and Reviews

by Alfred Chester, Edward Field (Editor)

Looking for Genet  brings together twenty-five of Chester’s notorious essays and reviews, including pieces on Nabokov’s  Pale Fire  (“a total wreck, and for one it’s not funny, and it’s supposed to be”), Burroughs’s  Naked Lunch  (“the first half is pleasantly readable without too much skipping, the second is pleasantly skippable without too much yawning”), and Updike’s  Pigeon Feathers  (“a god who has allowed a writer to lavish such craft upon these worthless tales is capable of anything”). Here too are sketches from his penniless bohemian life in Paris, seven “Letters from Morocco” written for the New York Herald Tribune, and Chester’s final piece―the half-mad, previously unpublished “Letter from the Wandering Jew,” a howl of rage and despair from his hated final home, Jerusalem. Together these pieces are testament to the life and the talent of the Sixties’ most memorable literary iconoclasts.

260 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1992

About the author

Alfred Chester was born on September 7, 1928 in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a family of Jewish-Russian immigrants. He received his B.A. at New York University in 1949 and completed some graduate study at Columbia University. In 1951, he left for Paris as other bohemian expatriates had done before him, most notably, Gertrude Stein.

While living in Paris (1951-1958) he began his career as a serious writer, composing such works as the collection of short stories, Here Be Dragons (1955) and his first novel, Jamie Is My Heart's Desire (1956). During this time, Chester also met and began a relationship with an Israeli pianist, Arthur, with whom he lived in Paris and, for a short time, in New York City. While in Paris, Chester befriended other literary figures, such as Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, and Princess Marguerite Caetani.

Upon returning to New York City in 1959, Chester enjoyed considerable success and fame throughout the 1960's, and was very much a part of the avant-garde literary scene. He continued to write essays and criticism for various magazines, and also published the works Behold Goliath (1964), The Exquisite Corpse (1967), and Head of a Sad Angel (1953-1966). During this time, however, Chester was afflicted with deteriorating health and psychological instability, and was as well a serious drug user and alcoholic. In 1963, he sailed to Morocco on the advice of his friend Paul Bowles, and this marked the beginning of a series of erratic travels all over the world. On August 2, 1971, in Israel, Alfred Chester died in obscurity; by this time, he had become alienated from most of his friends and the literary circles of New York.

Reviews

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Following my brief post on Alfred Chester, J took the initiative and grabbed me a couple of his books Looking for Genet: Literary Essays and Reviews (Chester's work collected by his literary executor Edward Field) and the novel The Exquisite Corpse. It is a pleasure to write that Chester's writing is as exciting as everyone has written. I am immersed in the critiques in Looking for Genet (so far I have only read Diana Athill's Afterward in The Exquisite Corpse) and find myself chuckling at his comments on contemporary authors. His approach to these essays is to make them short, pithy, acerbic and very funny. He uses turns of phrase and analogies that are often odd but that make perfect sense when one reads them. I have been enjoying his work immensely which only makes it sadder that he has almost completely disappeared from literary praise. I am grateful to J for allowing me the chance to read these books (they are not available through the local public library) and find myself wanting to delve further into his work and his life. At the same time I have been reading an author who sings high praise of Chester, Cynthia Ozick. Her collection of essays Fame & Folly includes a portrait of Chester that gives insight into the affect he had on writer's of his own generation while making me appreciate another author I only knew through her poetry.