Alfred Chester

Background

Alfred Chester was born on September 7, 1928 in Brooklyn; the son of Jake Chester, a furrier, and Anna Chester.

Education

Alfred Chester was educated at Orthodox Jewish yeshiva. He studied at New York University where he got a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949. From 1949 to 1950 he attended graduate school at Columbia University but dropped out.

Career

Chester began publishing his first creative work while enrolled at Washington Square College, part of New York University. Pieces he wrote appeared in university publications, including Compass, Apprentice and Varieties.

While still a student, Chester made friends who would be important to him throughout his life, including Cynthia Ozick, Curtis Hamack, and Hortense Calisher. In Paris, where he lived for ten years, he mingled with the intensely literary expatriate community, including Carson McCullers, Eugene Walters, Mary Lee Settle, James Baldwin, and James Broughton. He also became acquainted with Mary Louise Aswell, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and Robert Silvers, who became publisher of the New York Review of Books. Though intellectuals enjoyed Chester’s short stories for their fanciful, avant-garde aesthetic, he was not widely read. His first story collection, Here Be Dragons, was published by subscription. But when his work was published in England, British writer and critic V. S. Pritchett, speaking on the British Broadcasting Corporation, called him “an exciting talent: original, fearless and very capable.”

Chester’s early work in this Paris period, which covered most of the 1950s, largely resembled the southern Gothic style that characterized the writing of McCullers and Truman Capote. Over time, however, he became more comfortable with surrealistic prose, that would reach full expression in his 1967 novel, The Exquisite Corpse. It was in Paris, as well, that Chester first began seriously exploring his homosexuality. There he began a live-in affair with a pianist, Chester’s longest and arguably most important relationship. It ultimately ended, a casualty of conflicting career demands, and became the inspiration of Chester’s short story “From the Phoenix to the Unnameable. Impossibly Beautiful Wild Bird” included in the short-story collection Head of a Sad Angel.

In Jamie Is My Heart's Desire, Chester’s first novel, an undertaker (Harry Sutton) learns to love by interacting with a corpse named Jamie, whom some characters can see and others cannot; at the same time, a poet (Mark) learns to avoid love through Jamie, and Emily, a social worker, learns to love her work through Jamie. The novel generated interest and mixed reviews.

The same year, “Head of a Sad Angel,” was printed in Prize Stories 1956: The O. Henry Awards. In 1957, Chester won a Guggenheim fellowship, and with it he composed some of his best short stories. Chester’s work was always more popular in Europe than in the United States, but in 1959 he succeeded in getting a short story accepted for publication in the New Yorker magazine, and that appears to have provided him with the incentive to return to Manhattan. He quickly became an important member of the literary scene there. Bu this time he had begun writing stories that had explicitly homosexual characters and themes, such as “In Praise of Vespasian,” long before doing so had achieved public legitimacy.

Chester became one of the country’s top critics, which discomforted him. His critical articles appeared in well-established periodicals, among them the Partisan Review, Commentary, and the New York Review of Books. He reviewed the works of such luminaries as Updike. Nabokov, Genet, Capote, Isherwood, and Mary McCarthy.

But for all his popularity among editors, he remained unable to earn enough from his writing to lift himself out of poverty.

In 1963, therefore, he moved to Morocco, an inexpensive Mecca for American artists in that decade. He spent the year working on Behold Goliath, a collection of stories in which homosexuality and love play through various characters. Though critics found this intriguing, they questioned its execution. Some critics found Chester’s treatment of homosexual love hackneyed, even as it was bent on shocking the public. Chester’s most ambitious project, The Exquisite Corpse, was published to equally as much interest and confusion. Critics called the novel a bold experiment, but forecast its failure.

Though the mainstream never embraced Chester’s work, he succeeded among the avant-garde. But during the late 1960s his mental health began to decline, as did his work. Toward the end of his life he produced only fragments; “The Foot,” a semi-autobiographical piece, was edited down to its current form from a notebook of difficult jottings. Another late essay, “Letter from a Wandering Jew,” also describes personal experiences; these were only published posthumously.

Achievements

• Alfred Chester’s literary legacy only amounts to a few stories, essays, and novels, but his literary influence during the 1960s and 1970s was significant. Chester’s work, cheeky and wildly experimental, was a highlight of the 1960s avant-garde movement.
  
  In 1957 Alfred won a Guggenheim fellowship.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Exquisite Corpse

    (Lyric and tender one moment, cruel and dizzying the next,...)

    1970
  • Looking for Genet: Literary Essays & Reviews 1992
  • Head of a Sad Angel 1990
  • Jamie Is My Heart's Desire 1957
  • Behold Goliath 1964

Personality

Alfred Chester possessed a powerful mind and a strong sense of human fragility. He was startlingly lucid, his prose style shocking and amusing his readers. His fiction also shocked readers, often by glorifying his homosexuality. Through his work, Chester questioned the status quo of literature and lifestyle.

Connections

Father:

Jake Chester

Mother:

Anna Chester