The Exquisite Corpse

by Alfred Chester, Diana Athill (Afterword)

Lyric and tender one moment, cruel and dizzying the next, this literary tour de force neither celebrates perversity nor laments it, rather it projects it as part of man's impossible quest for a true self. In 49 brief, highly cinematic chapters, we meet a series of twisted but sincere searchers, each in their own flight from despair.

Genres: Fiction, Gay, Queer, LGBT, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Literature

263 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

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

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the end of the green corridor, a woman appeared, a large fat woman in a pink nightgown with two babies in her arms. She too began screaming. Husband and wife were yielding up nightmare screams. Yet, despite all their terror and desperation, Baby heard in their voices and read in their faces something that said At Last. At Last the faceless nameless horror that lurked, that marched, that ran, that followed, that flowed, that crept under doors, that gnawed, that knocked, that rapped, that sighed, that whispered, that threw its black shadow, that poured its hot breath, that watched from nowhere and everywhere- At Last it had appeared. At Last its presence was upon them.
Me?
Baby Poorpoor thought: Can it be me?

I have this image of Alfred Chester watching over someone as they sleep. He would almost touch their hair with an open hand. Or he would tousle it in a tell tale left over manner for the morning, depending on how much sweet was missing from the bitter longing. I feel like he was doing this for the characters in his book. To see someone who does not see you, and the left over ache from that kind of unrequited love. If you shook them really hard their faces would settle back into inscrutable coldness that did not include you. Would you believe in what you saw before they had time to construct a mask?


What happens in The Exquisite Corpse stays between the lines, underneath the surface. What happens as an event will not be the same when you meet them again. They look like strangers outside, with new names and places they've been. A woman will lose her baby in exchange for a changeling. A never mind on the lips when it is too late to matter to the one who was given away. She will not be with her Husband (Ellen, a social worker) again, or will stay with a man she meets in the woods. She is someone else now. A man will murder and later his victim will be alive once more. It is always too late when it matters to the one who was sacrificed. I guess this might bother some readers. I was interested in that the truths stayed the same the way that they did. Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay A Room of One's Own about a kind of truth that didn't necessarily happen. I liked that Chester was interested in this kind of truth too. It didn't matter what it looked like on the outside as much as it felt on the inside. He had a fairy tale inside the kaleidoscope of modern hardship. Nightmares of fathers telling their kids they always loved them when what if they didn't die for real and you had to face the chance that they would let you down again as they always did.

"Listen, mister, I admit there's a resemblance to what Tommy used to look like. But my Tommy has a sweet crippled face now and a heart of gold. And I love him. I will as long as I live. He bought me that car there- a lot of shit you handsome guys ever buy anybody.

Once upon a time there was an infant. His mother calls him Emilio. Once upon a time there was a father to say he was named after him. Maybe his mother gave up her real baby to ugly on the inside fairies. This isn't my son. He's a changeling. In one reality she will take him on her back in search for what belongs to her. It all broke my heart for what could happen next.

A young island girl writes to an advice column about the changed face of her wealthy American lover who used to take care of her. What it must have looked like making love in the dark and now with the light on, now that he doesn't trust her to love his deformed face. She has the voice of a religious zealot who must ask another for permission to feel what they really feel. She speaks one thing and means another. She sells herself in windows in Amsterdam. My ex boyfriend once described to me what this looked like. This girl must have sat in a window waiting to hear what she was worth in this way all her life. Her old boyfriend must have been waiting for something just the same. I liked that it still felt sad when he didn't trust her. Like maybe it would have been different for either of them in someone said something other than a price. I am not religious but maybe what people felt like when their faith gave them strength they wouldn't believe in without it.

There once lived a man who loved a beautiful young man. There are a lot of men like this and I felt the price again. The mother of the baby has to go looking for dollars (never more than two) in her husband's breasts. What would it be like for them if the cost was never named between any of them.
The "But I love you" I can imagine pleading, as an excuse, underneath everything wouldn't need to wait until everyone else was asleep.

But there's a moment when he goes to look for the beautiful young man, always at a price for all, there passes an understanding between him and the wrong beautiful man grown up. Hands together on the table. I don't believe it is him and I wish it was. The fantasies always feel this impossible what ifs sweetness. The Christmas carolers defeat the Warden underneath the gates of Sing Sing. Mary reads the mysterious smiles correctly on the unreal faces of the pretend mothers. She's accepted on a lie, sacrificing her real baby for a false one, to be one of them. The day comes when you know what the right thing to say is. The Exquisite Corpse is made up of so many afraid to say out loud dreams that it is hard to call it a story as much as a sighing I wish. The edge that pricks, forbidding rest in peace of mind that was purchased. Their features change and the pain still bleeds in everything. I'd call it surreal if I didn't always know where I was from how it hurt. I had this feeling about Alfred Chester that he wanted to be anyone else and his characters could be someone else and still not escape it. It felt like talking to yourself. I don't know how to describe the relief in that you can't erase yourself no matter how much you may want to. If you could just get rid of that than nothing would matter. It makes sense to me that the ugly love is beautiful even if you hate it with every fiber of your being yourself. My feeling is that Alfred Chester hated himself. The closet comparison I can make is Jean Genet. If you've read Our Lady of the Flowers and remember the poop love scene? There are parts much grosser than that in 'Corpse' (and for that reason I can't imagine many embracing it. My one gr friend to read it described it as "too sick"). It's the guts womb and if you've got to live in it it's pretty incredible that someone could find beauty in that kind of life. The after dark and abandon. It's cathartic if you've ever had to live with that kind of low self esteem. You also wish he'd get off his knees and love himself too. The reality of being someone else you can see apart from yourself can be a needed shake. You wish he'd watch over himself as he slept too. The open palm of love for others and the hard fist for his own face. It will settle back into its face no matter what, but maybe for a time.... It's a knowledge when you are asleep. Maybe one day you'll believe it. Alfred Chester didn't but once he tried and that kinda kills me.

[Len · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am sure I have just read something important - I wonder what it was about? That was my immediate response to The Exquisite Corpse. Other than alcohol I have never indulged in drug taking, and neither have I experienced sodomy, transsexualism or sado-masochism, this left my ability to judge the text a little lacking. I can understand the disruption to consciousness that artificial stimulants or depressants can have on the flow of rational thought, having had a hangover or two, and disruption is the nature of the book.

When Chester set his mind to it the depth of his talent takes shape, as in Chapter 29 when Baby goes home and talks to his mother and father, takes their memories and adds his own. It is very short yet has wonderful writing. Or Chapter 35: Xavier walking through New York's nighttime streets and meeting the lonely Tommy:

"Shivering, [Xavier] hurried down Fourteenth Street and went into the Automat. Warm and steamy, like diving into a bowl of vegetable soup. His teeth chattered as his grateful body learned of the heat.

"Xavier looked around at the people and saw that they were the ones, or just like the ones, who crowded into Union Square on fair nights. There were the old men and women who looked Jewish and sounded like books about the 1930s. Even here in the Automat, he could hear them quarreling about Roosevelt and Franco and Hitler and Stalin. The New Deal. ILGWU. NRA. WPA. CP. The initials floated around like the letters in alphabet soup.

"There were also cab drivers and truck drivers having their midnight lunches, students, bums, and one table in the middle was packed with Latin American queens who were carrying on like ladies in evening gowns drinking champagne at an uptown club. And there were some solitaries - inexplicable people who sat, refusing to explain themselves. They caught Xavier's imagination. He thought of them, as he did of himself, as night creatures."

Beautiful stuff. If only Chester didn't keep dragging in the drug infused fantasies that do little more than disturb the flow. Mary watching Emily's baby son fall to his death from a block of flats and being so stoned that she can only think of going to the supermarket:

"Grabbing her shopping bag, she rode down the twelve flights to the street. There he was, out on the walk in front of the house! A pile of bloody meat! It made her shudder. Death, how awful and tragic! The pavement was covered with bloody footsteps and carriage tracks. The ladies had passed right through the mess.

"What oh what would Emily think? She would never forgive Mary. Life in the enchanted garden was as good as over. With endless sighs and tears, Mary went into the local supermarket and pulled things off the shelves for supper. For her Last Supper! Life was such hell! London broil. Artichoke hearts. Ice cream. Olives stuffed with capers. Frozen bisque of lobster. And a whole terrace smeared with caviar."

And then in Chapter 41 it slips back to lucidity with the two middle-aged transvestites, John Anthony (Julie) and Veronica on the town. The sexuality may be sleazy but at the heart of it is a talented comic novelist wanting to get out.

Yes, it is something important after all, as impenetrable as it often is. While it may not be for the easily offended and is definitely not one for the kiddies, it is well worth reading as a blast of alternative literature from the 1960s.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read weird books before. Naked Lunch, House of Leaves, Finnegans Wake, Translated Accounts? Been there, done that.

But this novel flummoxed me completely. The problem isn’t the writing, which is as clear as the dawn air. The problem is that the chapters leap from person to person without any apparent connection.

The chapter contents are like slides from a nightmare. Once you read about a character poking his dying father's loose intestine, watching it snake loose and start hosing the apartment with liquid shit, you suddenly realise you’ve been cast far adrift from reality beach.

Apologies to the late Diana Athill, who was Chester's friend and editor.

[Brent Legault · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked his stories but I had a hard time with this novel. It was too. Just too, I don't know, I don't want to say sick, but something like sick, even though that isn't quite right. Demented? But I usually love demented. But not this. This was just too.

[Edward Champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no doubt that the neglected Alfred Chester had talent. In his view of the 1967 New York underworld (or rather the grimy truths hidden within apartments), he combined surreal touches (fairies and Christ get cameo appearances) with a fearless and gritty honesty that usually DOES not work, but that DOES work here. It's evident that Chester went out of his way to provoke. Which we obviously need. But Chester is better when he isn't trying so hard, when he is writing from febrile instinct and allowing his imagination to fuse with a near-poetic fury about LGBTQIA life being neglected in the 1960s. In many ways, Chester reminds me of the pre-Zuckerman period of Philip Roth, where Roth didn't always have his voice down and bombarded us with volumes of widely differing quality as he donned surrealism and scatological realism. Well, it appears Chester had the fusion of both down earlier and better than Roth did. My only modest complaints with THE EXQUISITE CORPSE is that the fascinating canvas of characters never quite comes together in a unifying way and that Chester is better when he writes from his gut rather than in a premeditated way.

[Matthew Everett · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting book but around page 180 I lost interest in the characters. There is some subterfuge and the shocking parts shock but I just lost the will of emotional investment.

Like if you read this book because of Diana Athill.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sort of in the same madcap vein as Brautigan, but like . . . not as fun?
Legend/speculation has it that Susan Sontag got the idea for "Notes on Camp" while spending time with Alfred Chester. Are you living for this scat fantasy, Queen?

[Howard · Rating 1 out of 5]

A surrealistic mess - for academics only

At the April 2008 meeting of the NYC LGBT Center book discussion group, we had a very nice sized group of men and women to discuss "The Exquisite Corpse" by Alfred Chester.

On the surface, this sounded like this might be a challenging but interesting book (a la Barnes' "Nightwood"). But I think that nobody liked this book and a couple of readers hated it a lot.

The characters change name and gender between chapters, and the story is told non-sequentially. Maybe.

It is a surrealist novel and one reader probably had the right idea when he said "After 100 pages, I just read it and didn't think about it - like a Bob Dylan song. I sort of enjoyed it, but I didn't try to make much sense of it." Another reader pointed out that Chester was a brilliant critic and much in demand. He almost single-handedly derailed John Rechy's early career.

But he worked on this novel for years - and we just didn't get it. One reader pointed out that some of the individual scenes were very cinematic, extremely powerful and moving, but they didn't come together to amount to much.

This book gets our lowest rating for appropriateness for gay reading groups. No stars. For academics only.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a wild and wonderful read- kind of like a swirling alternative fairy tale with multiple characters and plots interspersed in 49 short chapters. You don't have to rationalize everything that happens - just enjoy it as kind of an amusing literary roller coaster.

This edition had an excellent afterword by Diana Athill which not only explains the novel's title which came from a parlor game where participants would each contribute unrelated sentences to a story and then the last person contributes the summary. She also discusses the author's mental illness which seemed to worsen after this book was published.

[hermit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Almost good, but I don't think I'd pick it up again.
Sped through the chapters as I was reading it, but there were long pauses between when I would pick it up again after putting it down. I think the summary on the back is a bit hyperbolic of the book's contents itself.
At some points I was very interested but I was increasingly finding myself very bored and waiting to be done with it. I only really cared for one of the characters, though I still kind of enjoyed the way they all intersected with eachother and being able to put some of the pieces together.

[Idiotpea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked up a first edition copy for 1 euro at a kiosk and went in with 0 idea that this was even a queer novel. Save to say, it did not disappoint even though it felt like a fever dream I couldn't put down.

[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.

[Joseph · Rating 1 out of 5]

This one flew right over my head. The best part of the book was the afterword, which managed to paint Chester as a more interesting character than any in his novel.

As for the book itself, I can't really comment on the story, because he has mostly chosen not to have one, and it's difficult to say anything about the characters, as they're constantly in a state of flux. To be totally honest, I actually kind of like that idea, and the notion of having to puzzle out who's who, or even if there actually are multiple characters. But I don't think it works here. As for the racier parts of the book ... well, it's mostly the entire book, which kind of kills any kind of taboo thrill that might have been generated. Perversity awash in perversion eventually becomes mundane.

I feel bad, because this book, and Chester's writing, seems to have struck a chord with many people, but frankly, it did nothing for me.

[Tree · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't explain this book...you just gotta read it. I still don't really know what happened. But the prose is amazing. Chester has these great moments: Death in the garden, faeries stealing a baby, all of which are undoubtedly delusions of the character's minds. But it's all so entwined that it's hard to tell where reality begins and ends.

[Teree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Splendid! What a wonderful language he speaks. The worlds he created in this book are not ones we would like to visit, except for a glimpse of something bizarre, alien, painful, glamorous, desperate, dirty, filthy, infectious...
It's nothing like real life and everything like real life...deep down underneath.

[Rachell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in college, after proofreading an essay about it for a literary review. I couldn't tell you exactly what it's about -- I don't even know if it's "about" anything in a traditional narrative sense -- but it's surprisingly readable for an avant-garde work, and some of the lines have stayed with me for over 10 years. I still haven't tried a scotch and milk, though.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've enjoyed some very unusual books, but this one was just too disturbing for me (and I consider myself a pretty open-minded person). I read about the first 50 pages or so, but couldn't bring myself to finish it.

[Larry-bob Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surrealist novel. A bewildering array of characters interact, but it seems that some of them, though named differently, are actually the same people. I had to draw a diagram to try to puzzle it out. Chester captures strange mental states, not so surprising considering his own psychology.

[Desmond]

This book becomes incredibly confusing as characters become twisted in plots that see no boundaries between reality and fantasy. It's an amazing read, very creative and ferociously addicting.

[Robert Costic · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nightmarish, surreal book vividly written by a person who descended into madness.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Psychotic phantasmagoria.