298
JO H N SIMON
to profoundly love whom we have." But the reason for this split is made
hardly more clear than the reason for the split infinitives.
Probably this is where Chester's main difficulty lies : though he can
evoke the How magisterially, he is not very good at the Why. One
may
be convinced by his style, but not by his motivation. At its best, the style
pr.oduces images like "my pride . . . would not even allow me to admit
it has been wounded. My pride has pride." Or this, from a homosexua1
married to a narcissistic woman: "With her teeth in my throat and
my
teeth in hers, how could we avoid one flow of blood?" And there
an:
passages of sustained horror, comic or c,osmic, which give off a sinisterly
dazzling light: not enough to illuminate, but enough to take one's breath
away. There is the city which "offered its populace more than
mere~
every-evening freedom; it offered a variety of slaveries to which
the
freedom might be put," the slaveries culminating in a vision ,of "the
rectangular darkness of the national church with its two-dimensional
gods in technicolor." Or, more transcendentally: "Then suddenly I felt
something. I felt celestial disharmony. It's true we were chosen to
act
out murder. But it's God's will. God wills us to break God's laws. In the
black night of hatred and demons and horror, in our ;iolation of God's
laws, all the saints and angels acquiesce. God too. He doesn't merely
pardon us. He loves us."
This last, however, already verges on Chester's characteristic ex·
cesses, as when he speaks of "subpoenaed eyes ghosted with dreams,"
"twin crescents of snot that were his half-closed eyes," or has a weeping
homosexual imprecating
his
mother: "'Tell me,' he begged. 'You, my
only connection with eternity-you, through whose womb I touch the
roots of creation. Tell me, tell me who I
am.'''
Worse yet is such a
glibly portentous vacuity as this, about an expertly played · piece of
music: "this Polonaise . . . could deny all because, Like the heart,
it
incorporated all."
Still, Mr. Chester is able to describe homosexual relationships with
unflinching cogency, without edulcorating in the manner of Williams,
or romanticizing in that of Genet. But then he will produce a story like
"In Praise of Vespasian," in which the pathetic progress of a catainite
in search of love [sic] through Parisian
pissoirs,
London water closets,
and the men's rooms of New York is narrated in predominantly reli·
gious images and biblical language. The boy becomes a Christ figure,
and when, in a posthumous apotheosis, he prepares for
fellatio,
he
",opens his lips upon Life Everlasting." We are never allowed to
be
sure whether all this
is
to be taken as a joke--and
if
so, why?-or
seri–
ously-and if so, more than ever, why? One wonders whether Chester
himself knows.
For all his undeniable talent for evocation, infiltration of alien
