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,