Though Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) was one of the most promising young novelists of the Twenties, his productivity plummeted in later decades, and he didn’t publish a word of fiction after Apartment in Athens (1945). Readers curious about his long silence will be fascinated by his journals, which recall Ned Rorem’s celebrated diaries. Like Rorem, Wescott was a Midwestern boy, a Paris prodigy, and then a man-about-Manhattan, where he found ample opportunities to name-drop (“I am dining with Mrs. Astor, after all—her canceling. . . her dinner party was just to punish Monroe for committing infidelity with Mrs. Rockefeller”). Like Rorem, Wescott was homosexual, narcissistic, and promiscuous, and (in his diaries) candid about all three; like Rorem, he was a believer in craft and Gallic elegance.

Yet Wescott’s career, unlike Rorem’s, ground to an early halt, and the journals help explain why. His brother and sister-in-law—who provided him with an income and a house on their New Jersey farm—considered homosexuality a crippling disorder, and Wescott’s willingness to be patronized by them (in every sense of the word) strikes one as self-destructive, a capitulation to their verdict that made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Though he complains of his “loss of nerve,” his “love of unfinishable perfection,” and his “weakness, foolishness, self-indulgence,” the bottom line would seem to be that he was an autobiographically motivated writer whose remorse over his sexual leanings not only prompted him to become a family captive but ultimately rendered him artistically mute.

Paradoxically, however, even as Wescott took (in his words) a “dark view” of homosexuality, his cluttered coital calendar afforded him cheap self-esteem. Indeed, as his output dwindled, his ego fed increasingly upon his libidinous exploits, which Wescott (a major, and pathetically eager, source for Kinsey’s data on sexual behavior) discusses as if they were artworks. “There are more plots in our lives than in our books,” he notes, and he’s not exaggerating: though Monroe Wheeler (the longtime director of exhibitions and publications at the Museum of Modern Art) was his consort for nearly seventy years, Wescott—a self-described “triangular man"—was more at home in a triad than in a couple, maintaining in his household a post that one might term “auxiliary lover.” Add the sundry third-tier beaux, pick-ups, and threesomes and foursomes with various combinations of the above, and it’s impossible to keep the names straight without a scorecard. If at times love walked in, moreover, Wescott can be remarkably callous about these amours, writing at fifty-one: “Carl’s in despair. . . therefore no more fondness, no more fun. Michael has ceased to charm me. Insoluble pity of the poverty-stricken fife and the psychology of Tommy. Disillusionment in dearest Ronald. . .”

Why so baroque a love life? One gathers that promiscuity was at once Wescott’s way of asserting independence from his family, of evading self-examination (he confesses to a “dread of being left absolutely to my own devices”), and of surmounting—one tumble at a time, anyway—his insecurity, mostly about his talent. And there was, with each year, more to surmount. In the Forties Maugham asks him: “Whatever gave you the idea, whatever made you think, that you had the talent to be a novelist?” By 1954 Wheeler “despairs of me.” And a year later Wescott complains to the family maid that his mother talks to him as if he were fifteen. (Her reply: “Yes, I know, you poor thing.”) In the first half of 1953 his literary earnings totaled $6.88. It reads like a writer’s worst nightmare. Was his life, then, tragic? Wescott says no, averring the “happiness of my life in the essentials,” and insisting that all he really wants is “pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.” Yet there are passages here—such as the one wherein he declares his longing to make his nearest and dearest “proud of me”—that stir one’s deepest pity. Astors or no Astors, one trembles to imagine what it must have been like for this self-despising, self-deceiving soul to carry on for thirty-two more barren years.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 9 Number 5, on page 82
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