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Clique modernism: coterie aesthetics in midcentury America

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Clique modernism: coterie aesthetics in midcentury America

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CLIQUE MODERNISM:

COTERIE AESTHETICS IN MIDCENTURY AMERICA

by

NICHOLAS BECK

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

December 2022

Copyright 2022 Nicholas Beck
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to plenty of people for their help with this dissertation. The English Department at
USC has provided me not only with financial support, but also much guidance as I navigated my
various years of graduate study. Flora Ruiz, Javier Franco, and Jeanne Weiss have, at different
times, ably assisted me (as well as countless other students). I am thankful to them, alongside the
two Directors of Graduate Students I had, Emily Anderson and Meg Russett, for all they did to
see me through to the other side.
But beyond the emotional guidance, I also appreciate the glittering assistance provided by
various sources of funding. USC has been really benevolent – awarding me a Provost’s
Fellowship at the outset, and a Bing Arnold Fellowship a little further down the line. Right at the
end of this whole process, I had a truly dreamy research experience at the Harry Ransom Center
on the back of a Dissertation Fellowship from this archival institution.
I feel so lucky with the committee I managed to assemble. Alice Echols has been there to provide
the tough love; Andy Campbell, the comradely carrot; both have given me feedback that has
immeasurably improved my dissertation. Leo Braudy and Susan McCabe have been unstintingly
generous with their flexibility and expertise. Most of all, my chair Joe Boone has been an
enthusiastic champion and attentive reader of this project since I sounded him out about applying
to USC eight years ago. I wouldn’t have had anywhere near as much fun working on this project
without his care and good humor.
In a dissertation that is primarily about friendship, the support of my own social network should
not go unacknowledged. I have absorbed so much from the intelligent, hilarious people I know.
Sanders Bernstein, in particular, has always provided a perky ear when I needed to vent
iii
despairingly about work (among other things). Mike Petitti drove me around LA, massively
enhanced my knowledge of the city’s eateries, and gave me many an unsolicited piece of
teaching advice over drinks at the Dresden. Hannah Haines and Quinci Bryant have always been
extremely hospitable whenever I’ve needed a bed in a pinch.
Without the close-knit ties of my family – in particular my mother Jane, father Duncan, and
sister Rosie – I wouldn’t have ever gone to grad school. My parents have been a model of
support as they’ve watched me grow up through my many years of floundering; my dad with
beaming – at-times unfounded – optimism, my mum with loving wisdom. Rosie is my best
friend.
Finally, to my wife Lucy – long distance or close quarters, thanks so much for everything you
do. You’ve built a life for us out of a sharp wit (yours) and sharp claws (Polo’s). There’s nothing
I’m ever happier about.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………. ii

List of Figures.…………………………………………………………………………………….v

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...vi

Introduction: Friendship, Negativity, and Coterie Aesthetics…………………………………….1
Clique Feelings: Weakness, Failure, Hopelessness…………………………...11
Coterie aesthetics, coming into View………………………………………….22
“Knowing the Names:” Social Connection as Critical Argument…………….31

Chapter One: The Generation Game: Charles Henri Ford, Artistic Adolescence,
and Pederasty…….………………………………………………………………37
Ford, Vidal, Capote: homosexuality across the literary generations.…….…...46
Capote and Vidal: the literary maturation of the homosexual male.………….54
Charles Henri Ford: pederasty and artistic adolescence…………………...….64

Chapter Two: Writing for Goony Friends: Jane Bowles, Intimate Attachments, and the
Problematic of the Popular…………………………………………….…………74
Carson McCullers: Harper’s Bazaar writers and monster women…….…......82
Jane Bowles: intimacy’s strong pull…………………………….…………….93
In the Summer House: a drama of intimate attachments………………...........99
Jane Bowles, Alice Toklas: a pleasure beyond words……………………….109

Chapter Three: Grilling Private Pleasures: Alice Toklas, Sexual Non-Disclosures,
and Culinary Coteries…………………………………………………….….…115
Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol: shoes and gossip………………….………....124
Warhol, Stein, and Toklas: determining private matters..…………………...133
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook: desire and the domestics.……………..........143
Alice Toklas, Andy Warhol: canned goods and eggy pleasures.……...…….151

Chapter Four: Giving Away Secrets: Parker Tyler, Petty Geniuses, and
Tributes to the Clique ….…………………………………………………….…162
Gore Vidal: trans secrets and mean camp……...………………….………....169
Parker Tyler, Pavel Tchelitchew: exhaustion, disappointment, and clique
relations……………………………………..………………………………..181
Tyler, Tchelitchew, Charles Henri Ford: secrets and indiscretions of the Lion
Man……………..............................................................................................193
Tyler and Tchelitchew: pansy texts, queer diminishments…….…………….206

Conclusion: Stuck in Ambivalence……………………………………………………………..211

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………214

v
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Andy Warhol, “The autobiography of alice B. shoe.” in Shoes, Shoes, Shoes………125

Figure 2: Andy Warhol, “Piglet” in Wild Raspberries…………………………………………154

Figure 3: Andy Warhol, “Hard Boiled Eggs” in Wild Raspberries…………………………….158

Figure 4: Pavel Tchelitchew, Phenomena……………………...………………………………198

vi
ABSTRACT

My dissertation, Clique Modernism, examines the life and work of four writers who held a minor
creative status in the artistic communities of the mid-twentieth-century United States. I argue that
the often-negative experiences of Jane Bowles, Charles Henri Ford, Alice Toklas, and Parker
Tyler in this period represent a coterie aesthetic practice – a version of artistic production that is
predicated on the tight-knit quality of the artist’s social relations. I analyze how, in different
ways, these figures integrate the content of their social lives into their written work. By doing so,
these writers illuminate how the social machinations of their art world shapes the development of
aesthetic judgment during the years between World War II and the late nineteen-sixties. In an era
of changing political concerns and expanding popular audiences, these writers expose the
continuing attachment of a postwar artistic culture to the denigrated, exclusive social formation
of the coterie. By considering the intertwined nature of aesthetic production and social relations,
as well as the sexual concerns that underpinned them both, I provide a new lens through which to
explore the meaning of intimacy, accentuating the ambivalent, unsettling affective states that
bubble up for these writers within their deep personal relations.

1
INTRODUCTION:
FRIENDSHIP, NEGATIVITY, AND COTERIE AESTHETICS

“At all events, one may observe impersonally, it is a great problem permanently to be friends
with everyone.”
Parker Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew
1

This dissertation deals with the intricacies of friendship. Maintaining these friendships, as the
subjects of this study show, is often difficult. Especially when you’re a part of an artistic coterie
where you’re all going up against each other: for the same jobs and the same prizes; the same
patrons, the same audience; the same prestige. In such competition, we see individuals negotiate
the pangs of intimacy through aesthetic judgments. The personal ties I analyze appear within a
mid-twentieth-century artistic community, where an intergenerational bunch of queer American
writers – including Jane Bowles, Charles Henri Ford, Alice Toklas, and Parker Tyler – jostled for
creative recognition on overlapping art scenes in the period after World War II. The ambitions of
these writers were very different: when the war ended Bowles, for example, was in her late
twenties with one novel to her name, while Toklas was forty years her senior, and soon to
embrace a sorrowful life as a modernist “widow” after the death of her partner Gertrude Stein.
Their ambitions, along with their perception of themselves as writers, were contingent upon the
varying positions they occupied within postwar creative hierarchies. What ties these individuals
together in my project – beyond their participation within a shared social network – is their
public association with an exclusive attitude that structured their social relations and permeated

1
Parker Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969),
362.
2
their written work. Willingly or unwillingly, Bowles, Toklas, Tyler, and Ford cultivated a clique
sensibility where their creative and critical writing was known, in private and public discourse,
for how it perpetuated a set of socially insular concerns. In my dissertation, I call this blending of
an exclusive social behavior and an exclusive artistic practice “coterie aesthetics.”
I use the terms “clique” and “coterie” interchangeably to describe an exclusive social
formation whose participants are primarily preoccupied with the particular, insular details of
their relations with one another. Other scholars have produced compelling studies of this social
formation in the midcentury period. Lytle Shaw looks at the poet Frank O’Hara and argues that
scholars should find “a way to understand his interest in literary coterie as something other than
an unfortunate weakness.”
2
Such re-evaluations of the coterie challenge the negative attitude
towards this social formation that peppers modernist studies. Lawrence Rainey is typical when,
in his foundational study on the “institutions of modernism,” he argues that the poet H. D.
decided “to indulge in the evasive complacency of coterie poetics and to shun a more genuine,
more probing engagement with her contemporaries.”
3
I am suspicious of the simplistic binary
that Rainey establishes here, where the coterie stands in for a negative, insincere form of social
relations compared to the purportedly “genuine” and “probing” connections that can be mined in
other types of group kinship, such as those covered under the term “community.” Why can’t a
coterie – and the art that gets produced from within it – be structured out of relations that feel
just as deep and heartfelt as any other social formation?

2
Lytle Shaw, “On Coterie: Frank O’Hara,” Jacket2 10 (October 1999), jacketmagazine.com/10/shaw-on-ohara.html,
n.p. For a more recent scholarly example that identifies the value in coteries, see Michelle A. Taylor, “(In)discreet
Modernism: T. S. Eliot’s Coterie Poetics,” College Literature 47, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 34–64. Taylor argues that T.
S. Eliot, secure in his own postwar institutional power, could practice a personally liberatory poetics of
“indiscretion” that was predicated on the intimate ties of his friendship network.
3
Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), 168.
3
This question aligns Clique Modernism with these other re-evaluations of the coterie.
But, while I am sympathetic to the critical intentions in the work of scholars like Shaw and
Michelle Taylor, I’m more interested in thinking about the binary set up by Rainey. This is not
because I agree with Rainey; rather, it is because I recognize how negative conceptions of the
coterie like his have circulated with great discursive power. This project is not an attempt to
divorce the clique from these connotations (even as my work implicitly seeks to destigmatize this
social formation), for, as Nathan Waddell notes, while the boundaries between “coterie” and
“community” are blurry, these terms tend to stay fixed as negative and positive forms of group
kinship.
4
I think cliques and coteries ought to be less vilified; after all, what’s more fun than
feeling a part of an exclusive social crew? (I make this claim more from aspiration than from my
own lived experience.) Nevertheless, this dissertation investigates the ways in which this social
formation is attached to negativity, and explores the impact of this attachment for the coterie’s
inhabitants. The clique, within aesthetic discourse, is associated with bad, even degenerate art
and social practices. Coterie aesthetics, therefore, often catalyzes feelings of weakness, failure,
and hopelessness within the social relations of its practitioners. Severing the attachment between
the coterie and negativity would gloss over the affective experience of this judgment for the
figures I study.
These negative feelings are difficult to shake off because, I concede, the clique is hardly a
space infused with halcyonic energy. Indeed, at times for my subjects it feels more brutal than a
visit to Leo Bersani’s bathhouse.
5
Ford and Tyler, who were genuinely lifelong friends, tore

4
Nathan Waddell, “Modernist Coteries and Communities” in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter
Brooker, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
740–61.
5
“Anyone who has ever spent one night in a gay bathhouse knows that it is (or was) one of the most ruthlessly
ranked, hierarchized, and competitive environments imaginable.” Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October
43 (Winter 1987): 206.
4
absolute strips off each other; some of the letters they wrote to each other were lacerating. “I
could call your Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelichew [sic] a sad failure too and add much more
devastating criticisms,” Ford wrote to Tyler about the book the latter had published about Ford’s
lover (Ford, in turn, was responding to Tyler’s published criticisms of his film Johnny
Minotaur).
6
These ruptures pockmarked the relations of each of my subjects. While I don’t claim
that maintaining friendships was necessarily a more difficult task within a coterie than in other
social formations, I think these cliques do lay bare the intensity with which intimate relations are
muddied up with rank, hierarchy, and competition. This intensity is one of the main reasons why
the coterie is my central object of analysis. In their experience of intimate relations, we not only
see people feeling bad; we also see them feeling deeply, with all the instabilities that deep feeling
can catalyze. An analysis of the relationships within coteries, therefore, is no surface reading.
7
It
is, rather, a study that seeks to read between the lines of artistic works and social encounters,
teasing out the ambivalent emotions that are sloshing around in the receptacle of this social
grouping.
And, to be frank, there were lots of things for my coterie writers to be ambivalent about
in the postwar period. I tend to address the political stakes of the midcentury coterie obliquely –
in part because it reflects the overt political disinterest of my subjects – but the chief concern that
I explore over the course of my four chapters is the appearance in American culture of a mass
public demand for literary products. The postwar era was a time when the legacies of modernism
were involved in “a complex engagement with the emergence of a fully-fledged mass culture in

6
Ford to Tyler, 22 March 1972, in the Parker Tyler Collection, Harry Ransom Center, Box 42, Folder 1.
7
See Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009):
1–21. For a critique of the “sentimentalized psychology” that underpins surface reading’s emphasis on the text as
under threat from “any hermeneutic attention,” see David Kurnick, “A Few Lies: Queer Theory and Our Method
Melodramas,” ELH 87, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 357–62.
5
the United States.”
8
While pre-war modernists like Gertrude Stein were certainly not adverse to
courting popular attention (as I discuss in chapter three), a new generation of writers had even
greater opportunities to address an audience that stood outside of their personal social network in
the wake of World War II.
9
Initiatives sparked by America’s wartime involvement, such as the
distribution of the Armed Services Editions of paperback books, had introduced a series of
canonical literary texts to a wider audience, which contributed to the demand for literary
products as a form of mass cultural engagement.
10
Editors such as George Davis and Mary
Louise Aswell were placing their friends in popular magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar,
Mademoiselle, Vogue, and the short-lived Flair, providing these writers with a platform to
address a wider public. The expectation held by my subjects was that they might successfully
take advantage of these publishing opportunities and attain a widescale popular recognition for
their author profile and creative output. Over the course of my four chapters we will look at how
some of the artists in this social milieu – Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Paul
Bowles, Andy Warhol, and even Alice Toklas – did achieve success within the midcentury
literary marketplace.
11
But these successes (with the exception of Toklas) will primarily serve as
a counterpoint to the uncertainties felt by my subjects as they fell on the other side of the
problematic of the popular faced by writers in the postwar era.

8
Will Norman, Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2016), 2.
9
On Stein’s celebrity, as cultivated through popular magazines such as TIME and LIFE, see Jeff Solomon, So
Famous and So Gay: The Fabulous Potency of Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017), 115–37.
10
See Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2014), 109–28 and David Reid, The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire:
Politics, Art, and Bohemia (New York: Random House, 2016), 119–30.
11
See Evan Brier, A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
6
In this period, popularity works in a dynamic contrast with the coterie aesthetics that I am
describing. By “coterie aesthetics” I am not just referring to any artistic practice that emerges out
of a clique or coterie social formation. There were plenty of socially exclusive art circles out
there, in New York and elsewhere, that were not bogged down by a clique label. For example, as
they began to flex their muscles on the postwar New York art scene, the Abstract Expressionists
called their major forum “The Club,” but this didn’t seem to hinder their capacity for popular
recognition (as could be seen in LIFE magazine’s famous 1949 article on Jackson Pollock, the
subtitle of which asked “Is he the greatest living painter in America?”).
12
More than the success
they achieved, what distinguishes Abstract Expressionism from coterie aesthetics is that within
the pictorial frame of the former there is little reference to the clique-like “Club” in which these
painters participated socially. In marked contrast, the texts that I analyze under the banner of
“coterie aesthetics” each engage the permutations of the artist’s social life within the artwork
itself. Some of these representations appear in non-fiction literary mediums such as diaries,
memoirs, and biographies, where explicit reference to the writer’s social life is more common
practice. In fictional works, such as Bowles’s play In the Summer House (1954), a more veiled
interrogation of tight-knit social ties takes place. Regardless of these differences, the direct and
indirect ways in which my subjects make their clique available for audience consideration
constitute what I’m calling a coterie aesthetic practice. This aesthetic practice, in turn, is the
throughline connecting, say, the commercial success of a coterie text like The Alice B. Toklas
Cookbook (1954) and Bowles’s Broadway flop of the same year.
While each of my chapters takes a single coterie text as its primary object of analysis –
joining Toklas’s cookbook and Bowles’s play in my chapters’ analyses are Ford’s diary Water

12
“Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”, LIFE 27, no.6 (8 August 1949): 42–45.
7
from a Bucket (published in 2001, but written over a period from 1948 to 1957) and Tyler’s 1966
biography of Ford’s partner, the painter Pavel Tchelitchew – a study of the clique also requires
paying attention to what Gabriel Hankins calls, in a different context, “the particular, provisional,
distributed aesthetic life of modernism itself.”
13
A study of the intertwining of a social life and an
artistic practice means I read the scraps of aesthetic judgment that arise in informal modes of
communication. In each chapter I engage offhand references to my subjects that appear in critical
newspaper reviews, or in the suspect recollections of unreliable memoirs, or in the pot-stirring
letters between my principal writers and their friends and acquaintances. Within the narrative of
each chapter’s analysis, I amplify these casual, even blasé perceptions. This does not, I hope,
betray a certain gullibility on my part that distorts innocuous comments into statements that hold
major “significance” without any sense of scholarly proportion. Rather, this critical focus is
borne out of my belief that, when threaded together, these informal perceptions and
misperceptions form a patchwork that reflects the textural quality of my subjects’ social
experience. My aim, therefore, is for my dissertation to not only produce a close reading of
specific texts, but also to offer a close reading of my subjects’ lives within pockets of time across
the midcentury period.
I turn to gossip as one way through which to consider how aesthetic judgments are folded
into the social experience of my subjects. My reasoning behind this is not wholly an academic
one; I enjoy gossip and think it provides plenty of opportunities for a loose kind of intellectual
pleasure. Gossip has been historically dismissed as meaningless but paying attention to it, as
Reva Wolf argues, is to acknowledge that “the social dynamic of the art world is a potential

13
Gabriel Hankins, “The Weak Powers of Digital Modernist Studies,” Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (September
2018): 582.
8
subtext of art and art criticism.”
14
This insight is important for my dissertation; indeed, what I’m
arguing is that it is hard to think of matters of aesthetic judgment without turning to this social
dynamic. And within that social dynamic, gossip acts as “part of the very blood and tissue” of
community life.
15
This is because, as the anthropologist Max Gluckman has shown, gossip serves
as a fault line between insiders and outsiders. It produces forms of intimacy that can sharpen the
divide between those who are “in the know,” and those outside of these terms of knowledge.
Conversely, if gossip is trafficked between friends and strangers then this intimacy can also
create bonds across different social groupings. Thus, the relaying of rumors, scandals, and
secrets has the capacity to strengthen social ties. But the salacious details of gossip also mean
that this mode of communication can be a fraught one, as capable of rupturing social bonds as
solidifying them. This is because gossip leaves people vulnerable to judgment. In its instability,
gossip exposes the subject, rendering them knowable by others. Even when the information
being gossiped about is inaccurate, gossip is revealing, because it relies on the presumption that
there is something about the subject that can be revealed. The prospect of gossipy revelations,
therefore, is bound up intimately with uncertain feelings of pleasure and danger. To explore the
gossip exchanged within my chosen clique – “to learn,” as Gluckman writes, “its scandals” (314)
– not only enables me to participate within this network of knowledge on a narrative level; it also
helps me to tap into the affective responses structured around the gossip through which my
subjects circulate in their social lives.

14
Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 16.
15
Max Gluckman, “Papers in Honor of Melville J. Herskovits: Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology 4, no. 3
(June 1963): 308.
9
Wolf’s study of Andy Warhol and the New York School of Poets is just one in a series of
re-evaluations of the role of gossip in art and literary histories of the period.
16
These studies have
been especially important for thinking about gossip’s subversive potential for disempowered
subjects. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points to this potential, when she describes how the “precious,
devalued arts of gossip” have long been “associated in European thought with servants, with
effeminate and gay men, with all women.”
17
Gossip, for Sedgwick, was the mode of
communication that structures her “nonce taxonomies,” through which subjects are able to re-
make and re-vision the world from a position of marginality (Sedgwick [1990], 23). The
knowledges produced by nonce taxonomies “concern who to trust, how to read a social
landscape and how to navigate its dangers and possibilities, with a view to survival,” and, what’s
more, to allow marginal subjects “to turn merely living into pleasurable living.”
18
Gossip’s
informality, the pleasures it enables, allows for an insurgent transmission of knowledge between
marginal subjects, because of the way that it operates outside channels of official discourse. It is
through these “queer effects,” Chad Bennett argues, that gossip “suggests a vital source of
transformative, nonnormative energy” (Bennett, 21).
While over the course of my four chapters I lean on gossip’s association with queerness
and identify it as a site of social pleasure for my subjects (especially with regards to sexual
gossip), I find it difficult to square gossip’s transformative potential with the clique culture I
study. The way in which gossip functions between the subjects of my dissertation points to an

16
Beyond Wolf, a survey of those studies that focus on mid-twentieth-century artistic communities would include
Henry Abelove, Deep Gossip (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Gavin Butt, Between You and
Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Chad Bennett,
Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
17
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 23.
18
Clare Hemmings, “When M. Mitterrand was a Faggot: Reading Ignorance and Pleasure in E. Sedgwick’s
‘Axiomatic,’” Post45 (19 May 2020), https://post45.org/2020/05/when-m-mitterrand-was-a-faggot-reading-
ignorance-and-pleasure-in-eve-sedgwicks-axiomatic/, n.p.
10
alternative way of thinking about this mode of communication. The gossip that appears here
often has destabilizing consequences – sometimes produced by my subjects, and sometimes
affecting them – but these do not always feel steeped in a renegade energy. When we read Ford
and his partner Tchelitchew, for example, gossiping about their friend Edith Sitwell and
describing her as a “big white worm,” it doesn’t seem especially transformative; rather, it comes
across as mean and misogynistic.
19
In my dissertation, I accentuate gossip’s pernicious, as well
as its “precious,” qualities. If we are to consider, as Gavin Butt suggests, “how gossip’s
narratives might operate as history, and how such unverified forms of knowledge might come to
queer the very practice of historical accounting itself” (9, Butt’s italics), then that also warrants a
consideration of gossip’s complicities with the production of hegemonic forms of historical
knowledge. For all the pleasure it provides as an activity, gossip’s queer effects can also result in
harm, at least within this clique context. The clique, grounded in social exclusivity, offers a case-
study of gossip’s non-transformative traits, even as its close-knit ties make it a site where gossip
circulates with a particularly juicy intensity.
My study of the clique is thus responding to an uncertainty I feel about the transformative
value that gets placed upon gossip in queer scholarship. It also speaks to a wider uncertainty that
bubbles away in the background of my project’s argument. This is an abiding concern of Heather
Love’s, too. “Does queer thought require a utopian horizon?” she asks.
20
I turn to consider this
question in my next section, with an evaluation of some of the critical ideas that have shaped my
thinking in this dissertation. My uncertainty is borne out of my longstanding preoccupation with
the political stakes of my project: what are the implications of a modernist project that turns

19
Charles Henri Ford, Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948–1957, introduction by Lynne Tillman (New York: Turtle
Point Press, 2001), 18.
20
Heather Love, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 161.
11
away from analyzing global networks of writers and returns us to a study of a white, American
creative elites? While I’m spotlighting the insecurity of these elites by focusing upon relatively
“minor” artistic figures, my project may still strike some readers as an inadequate response to
recent trends in modernist studies, as well as to some of the more foundational concerns of queer
theory. Like the writers I analyze, a study of the clique feels out of time within the expectations
of contemporary scholarship. While I don’t have a ready resolution to this critique, I want to
explore how my project can complicate it further, engaging some of the scholarly currents that
my study is simultaneously swept along by and swimming against. I concede that Clique
Modernism may end up as inadequate in terms of its political value, but I also want to consider
what we can extract from a criticism that sits within its own inadequacies. To do that, I argue,
warrants a blunting of the utopian potential we expect from our pleasurable, yet painful, social
interactions.

Clique Feelings: Weakness, Failure, Hopelessness

Clique Modernism is a study in disappointment; it analyzes feelings of weakness, failure, and
hopelessness set against a backdrop of grand artistic ambitions. The subjects who are central to
my chapters did not achieve a sustained period of literary fame. Often their artistic status was
subordinate to that of their partner – Ford to Tchelitchew, Toklas to Stein, Jane to Paul Bowles
(the exception was Tyler, whose relationship with the younger filmmaker Charles Boultenhouse
appears more balanced in terms of their career development). While the power dynamics were
unstable, and inconsistent across these four major relationships, they could lead to emotional
fissures. Ford, for instance, resented his position as Tchelitchew’s “satellite”: “one famous artist
12
and one obscure poet,” he grumbled in his diary (Ford [2001], 117). Although not everyone
harbored such hostility in their relationships (as I show in chapter three, Toklas constructed her
“insignificance” in order to serve Stein’s writerly reputation), in their creative endeavors these
writers approached their lack of public recognition with a comparative lens, evaluating their own
worth through the progress of their intimates. This was compounded by their proximity to peers
who had achieved popular success, who often participated on the same social scene. The coterie
marked the limits of their artistic reception, but it also pointed to a way out of this exclusive
aesthetic practice through personal exposure to more publicly celebrated friends. As a result of
this tension, it was little wonder that my coterie writers felt ambivalent about the value of peer-
appreciation. “There’s no point in writing a play for your five hundred goony friends,” Bowles
told Vogue in the aftermath to the Broadway failure of In the Summer House, a quotation that I
orbit around in chapter two: “You have to reach more people.”
21

Throughout Clique Modernism I look at the ways that the uncertain desire to “reach more
people,” and the frustration of that desire, generates feelings of weakness for my subjects. By
placing these feelings at the center of my analysis, my project is aligned with the recent turn
towards “weak theory” in modernist studies.
22
In 2018, a special issue of Modernism/modernity
began a series of debates about the value of “weakness” in readings of modernism. In his
introduction to the issue, Paul Saint-Amour explained how “weak” scholarly readings harbor an
interest in “the proximate, the provisional, and the probabilistic” as objects of study, in contrast
to “strong” methodologies that wield totalizing critiques to garner their theoretical insights.
23

21
“Candidates for Prizes: Nine Younger Playwrights,” Vogue 123, no. 8 (1 May 1954): 137.
22
See the special issue on weak theory in Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (September 2018). In the months
following its publication, between 7 February 2019 and 15 August 2019, a series of responses were published on the
Modernism/modernity PrintPlus forum, which culminated in a set of “responses to the responses” by the authors of
the articles published in the original issue.
23
Paul K. Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (September 2018): 440.
13
Weak theory puts forward an argument that “does not even try to clinch the case,” making
possible a speculative analysis that remains open to disruptive details.
24
Like other theoretical
practices such as Sedgwick’s reparative reading, Love’s thin description, and Best and Marcus’s
surface reading, weak theory claims to reduce the critical impulse to master objects of study.
25
In
place of this impulse, a weak theoretical practice tracks a set of looser relations between subjects,
objects, ideas, and behaviors, attentive to the varied and multi-directional ways in which
knowledge circulates and is shaped by different local actors.
26

Weak theory stages an important intervention in the scholarly work of modernist studies,
but it views “weakness” differently from how I examine it in Clique Modernism. In weak theory,
“weakness” is primarily meant descriptively, to refer to the open-ended attributes of this
theoretical practice, rather than as an evaluative, negative judgment. But the descriptive and
evaluative meanings of the word, as Saint-Amour notes, have a tendency “to interfere with one
another” (Saint-Amour, 438). While the “weakness” of weak theory is about its non-totalizing
relation to disparate objects of study, it also fosters critical awareness of what Madelyn Detloff
evocatively calls the “gunk of living.”
27
An attention to “gunky” matters blurs descriptive
meanings of weakness (those that avoid the implications of a value-judgment) with evaluative
counterparts (where “weakness” acts as a negative corollary to the “strong”). So, within the
context of modernism, weak theory does not just constitute a piecemeal analysis of loosely tied

24
Wai Chee Dimock, “Weak Theory: Henry James, Colm Tóibín, and W. B. Yeats,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 4
(Summer 2013): 736.
25
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid You Probably
Think This Essay Is About You” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003), 123–51; Heather Love, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,”
New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 371–91; and Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading.”
26
Weak theory’s emphasis on local actors is influenced by the theorist Bruno Latour, who Dimock discusses in
“Weak Theory,” 736–37.
27
Madelyn Detloff, “On Going…Ongoing…Going On,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 3, cycle 4 (7 February
2019), modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/responses-special-issue-weak-theory-part-i, n.p.
14
connections; it also entails a reflection upon different iterations of the damaged life that emerged
across modernity. These are forms of damage that can be overlooked within recuperative,
utopian critical projects in literary modernism.
“Damage” might refer to the politically toxic values of key modernists: the anti-Semitism
of T. S. Eliot, the fascism of Ezra Pound.
28
It could also, perhaps more urgently, foreground the
damage experienced by those who have been designated “weak” throughout history: women;
people of color; religious and ethnic minority groups; queer subjects; people with disabilities;
indigenous peoples; colonized and postcolonial subjects; and those overlapping these identity
categories. In this vein, a portrait of the “weakness” of my subjects could fruitfully create
intersections between the “deviancy” of their sexual practices and the physical and mental
difficulties that affected their health and well-being (Charles Henri Ford, who died in 2001, was
the only one of these four figures who lived long beyond the 1960s, my dissertation’s historical
endpoint). Tyler, for instance, yokes himself to his biographical subject Tchelitchew through a
shared, mysterious semi-physical, semi-mental ailment that incapacitated the painter during his
career and Tyler in the writing of his biography. Examples like this, that pull connections out of
the bodily and mental suffering of two figures in pain, point to a reparative use of weakness that
is in line with the weak theoretical scholarship that finds its place in contemporary modernist
studies.
29

28
As Detloff notes, this list of suspect political sympathies goes on. Dimock focuses upon one version of this
toxicity through her analysis of William Faulkner’s sympathetic alliance between post-Civil War American South
and post-World War II Japan. Wai Chee Dimock, “Weak Network: Faulkner’s Transpacific Reparations,”
Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (September 2018): 587–602. In her response Detloff expresses doubt that
“Faulkner’s identification with loss […] is something I want to repair” (n.p.).
29
A critical model that explores this version of “weakness” is provided by Kate Zambreno, who writes about the
“marginalized women of modernism,” including Bowles and Toklas. Kate Zambreno, Heroines (Cambridge, MA:
Semiotext(e), 2012). Zambreno’s “amateur-criticism,” in turn, is discussed at length by Melanie Micir and Aarthi
Vadde in their contribution to the Modernism/modernity special issue on weak theory. Melanie Micir and Aarthi
Vadde, “Obliterature: Towards an Amateur Criticism,” Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (September 2018): 517–49.
15
My project considers the damage of weakness in a different light. Clique Modernism
insists upon the importance of viewing these subjects through the judgments they felt in their
lifetimes: judgments that labeled them as creative failures, as artistically limited, as personally
insignificant – in other words, as “weak” as a negative evaluation. By focusing on these feelings,
I am arguing that the entanglement of the various meanings of weakness within weak theory’s
application requires further emphasis upon the negativity that underpins this term. This negative
force is something that Saint-Amour acknowledges in his introduction. While he distinguishes
between descriptive and evaluative uses of weakness, he suggests that “we are still and always
confronting a term of subjection,” one that expresses feelings of subordination and inferiority
(Saint-Amour, 438). With this claim, he recognizes that the non-pejorative, descriptive meanings
of weakness that appear in weak theory’s application do not supersede the term’s evaluative
negative meanings. And yet, Saint-Amour also argues that weak theory’s “emergent, alternative
methods” invite us “to leave off theorizing weakness as a failure, absence, or function of strength
and instead to theorize from weakness as a condition endowed with traits and possibilities of its
own” (438–9, Saint-Amour’s italics).
A central component of my project’s argument is to challenge the implications of this
invitation. I want to show that theorizing “from weakness,” at least in how it pertained to the
subjects I study, means embedding it within the idea of “strength.” In midcentury artistic coteries
“strength” looked simultaneously like popular recognition and peer appreciation. When I
consider the failure of my subjects that counterbalance these achievements, I am asserting the
persistent negativity within weakness that weak theory acknowledges but rarely probes further.
In her contribution to the special issue, Grace Lavery provocatively asks: what “could we learn
16
from a history of literary criticism composed of […] spite, neglect, and resentment?”
30
While a
response to this question might be “must there always be something to learn?”, one lesson from a
literary history of ugly feelings is the entrenched position of weakness as an experience felt
negatively by those labeled “weak.” Clique Modernism speculates about some of the “traits and
possibilities” that emerge when weakness remains stuck within an unhappy relationship with the
strong, lacking hope of escape or repair. The underlying implication of my argument is that the
desire to represent weakness as a catalyst for “traits and possibilities,” rather than as simply,
negatively “weak,” spotlights a recuperative tendency in relation to which modernist studies
itself remains stuck. If we want to foster a modernism that, in Saint-Amour’s concluding words,
displays a “weakness that stays weak” (456), it requires a loosening of this critical impulse and
an avowal of weakness’s central negativity.
A study of the coterie offers a way to challenge weak theory’s current use in modernist
studies. Saint-Amour holds up coteries as an example of those descriptively “strong” social ties
that a weak criticism should move away from, replacing networks of exclusive, intimate relations
with a focus on a more extensive range of social relations. What he calls “coterie modernism”
produces “the fetish images of modernist studies in its early years” (439). A study of the clique,
by this reading, is passé, outmoded. While such claims helpfully call into question the
homogenizing tendency to laud Euro-American locales and groups as representative sites of
modernist activity, they fail to recognize the latent weakness that percolates within the social
relations of the coterie. In the postwar period I study, not many people seem to be waxing lyrical
about what the clique represents, so why should this social formation be overlooked when we
think of the place of weakness in modernist studies? A version of weakness built out of the

30
Grace Lavery, “On Being Criticized,” Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (September 2018): 513.
17
damaged, damaging strong ties of the coterie enables a critical grappling with the negativities of
modernism, without seeking to reclaim them as “possibilities” or “lessons.” My idea of weakness
does not travel across far-flung networks. Rather, it adheres within the insularity of strong
personal relations. Within the limitations of these borders, the clique produces unsettled affective
states that have the capacity to flip into an opposing emotional response, denying stable
resolution. The coterie, a social formation predicated upon excessively intimate ties, provides a
place to investigate this instability precisely because it is maligned as an outmoded “fetish
image” of modernist studies’ bad past. Looking at this knotted, enclosed social space, what, I
ask, are the persistent negativities that we must remain sitting with, without hope or expectation
of some meaningful learning to follow? In Clique Modernism, I suggest that these negativities
might look a lot like intimacy.
In its insistence upon the negativity of weakness, Clique Modernism shares an affinity
with queer critical enquiries into feelings of loss and failure. Jack Halberstam glosses Heather
Love’s influential exposition of “backwards feelings” as the ability “to recognize something in
these darker depictions of queer life without needing to redeem them.”
31
This seems an apt
description of the ambitions of my dissertation. But Clique Modernism diverges from
Halberstam’s own “queer art of failure” when it comes to our respective objects of study.
Published in 2011, Halberstam’s book is steeped in the scholarly tussles over the “antisocial
turn” that dynamized queer theory in the early twenty-first century.
32
Although Halberstam
appreciates antisociality for its rejection of a teleological narrative about the progress of queer

31
Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 99.
32
For the clearest articulation of the antisocial position see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). An early progenitor of this argument was Leo Bersani, Homos
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1995. Edelman’s polemic catalyzed a series of debates and responses,
including a panel at the 2005 MLA Annual Convention, which featured Edelman and Halberstam. Robert L.
Caserio, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer
Theory,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 819–28.
18
rights in the United States, he critiques the work of Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and other
proponents of queer antisociality for the “excessively small archive” they use to represent “queer
negativity” (Halberstam, 108). Halberstam characterizes this version of negativity as a “gay male
archive,” because of its interest in a “narrow range” of subjects (such as Tennessee Williams,
Jean Genet, and Andy Warhol) and “affective responses” (including ennui, ironic distancing and
camp): “this canon occludes another suite of affectivities associated with another kind of politics
and a different form of negativity, […] for example, rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience,
intensity, mania, sincerity, earnestness, over-investment, incivility, brutal honesty, and
disappointment” (108–9). Halberstam’s challenge to the “antisocial turn” rests upon a binary he
sets up between a “camp archive” and his own choice of archive (109). The latter, he claims, is
in fact “far more in keeping with the undisciplined kinds of responses that Leo Bersani at least
seems to associate with sex and queer culture” (109). In another long list, Halberstam suggests
why his subjects and affects are preferable; because of the political activity that this archive
represents. Rather than the distanced irony of camp, the “another kind of politics” that
Halberstam’s archive encompasses includes “[d]yke anger, anticolonial despair, racial rage,
counterhegemonic violence, punk pugilism.” These are the kind of antisocial behaviors that,
Halberstam claims, “embrace a truly political negativity” (110), because they display a superior,
more active level of resistance to the norms of the societal status quo.
But for all of Halberstam’s emphasis on “messy and undignified failure” (92), the binary
he sets up between these archives is too neatly packaged. His polemical division – a counter to
Lee Edelman’s own polemic against reproductive futurism – doesn’t work for my subjects. My
analysis of Ford, Bowles, Toklas, and Tyler show that there is no clean severance between the
affects of the “camp archive” and the one Halberstam champions (110). Unruly feelings of rage
19
and disappointment can seep into the experiences of camp icons and texts of the “gay male
archive” just as readily as the “lesbian style” that Halberstam claims is a better model for failure
(109–10).
33
Admittedly, unlike Halberstam’s archive, the feelings of my subjects do not rouse a
desire for political change. But focusing upon the mundane concerns that exist within a
community of sexually marginal subjects, which is what I do in Clique Modernism, recognizes
the bad feelings that flicker across different realms of existence, not just those deemed politically
active. These negative affects do not necessarily correspond to disruptive, “counterhegemonic”
responses that “embrace a truly political negativity” (110). The concerns of my subjects, so often
petty or trivial compared to the overtly oppositional forms of negativity that Halberstam prefers,
don’t really have this political utility. A bad review; a letter of rejection; a social snub: these
kinds of pain don’t tend to feel violently oppressive, but they are the minor pangs that, accreted
across lived experience, tend to determine the emotional quality of our daily existence.
If my defense of my project’s archive sounds bullish it is because I am aware my
argument is based upon the privilege of my subjects. While the queer writers of my project often
experienced their marginality through financial insecurity and its pernicious effects upon their
mental and physical health, there is plenty of evidence that reveals, as I will show over my four
chapters, their fulsome engagement with hegemonic ideas in the postwar period. While Bowles
and Toklas were Jewish (although both converted to Catholicism near the end of their lives), all
four of my subjects – alongside the coteries in which they participated – were white, and some of
their worries seem underwritten by the complacency of their relative racial security. Exposing
some of their behaviors, such as Toklas, who reportedly tried to goad her liberal friend Janet
Flanner by complaining about “niggers” and “thieving Arabs,” might lead us to think there is

33
In my view, Halberstam elides any differences between the “camp archive” and the “gay male archive,” which is
indicative of the broader stroke critical moves of his analysis.
20
little worth rehabilitating through a critical study of these subjects.
34
Clique Modernism,
therefore, risks pursuing a reactionary scholarly drift, one that asks us not just to look at “darker
depictions of queer life without needing to redeem them” (Halberstam, 99), but instead suggests
we think alongside genuinely unredeemable behaviors and attitudes without claiming to extract a
lesson from them. A radical critical practice involves reckoning with the reactionary values
within even the most egalitarian of beliefs, behaviors, or social relations.
This scholarly task is reflective of a study of the clique more broadly. The hierarchical
terms of these social relations ensures that elitism teeters very easily into prejudice, and the
insularity of its outlook allows people to put their very worst face forward within this
purportedly private social space. Therefore, rather than claiming that the clique or these subjects
“embrace a truly political negativity,” I locate the negativity of their actions and feelings in the
compromises and half-truths they spell out for a queer political vision. If we want to recognize
“darker depictions of queer life without needing to redeem them” then we should bear witness to
the “mess” that lurks within the failures of the camp archive, rather than misrepresenting this
version of antisociality as too “disciplined.” Within the affective range of my subjects, the
dynamic between discipline and mess, between ennui and rage, between camp and sincerity, are
always at play. This, as I foreground in chapter one’s analysis of Ford’s pederasty, can lead to
some deeply troubling behaviors.
Through this ambivalent dynamic, I approach the clique as a non-transformative site, in
which people feel stuck and do not display signs of growth or change. This sets my project on a
collision course with the utopian ambitions of queer theory, even as my work intersects with the
same ideas and subjects as some of this field’s most profound thinkers. Like José Esteban Muñoz

34
Leon Katz, “A Year With Alice B. Toklas,” Yale Review 100, no. 3 (July 2012): 21.
21
and Lisa Duggan, I seek to emphasize the pleasures of “bad sentiments […] of being bitchy,
depressed, jaded, cranky, or ‘over it.’”
35
But while Muñoz claims these states have the capacity
to “transcend hopelessness” because of the social collectivity they catalyze (Duggan and Muñoz,
277), this is not the case with my own group of writers. Although they display a cohesive set of
social relations, the coterie aesthetics of these subjects don’t convert individualized bad
sentiments into some semblance of transformative collectivity. Rather than deriving
transformation from the construction of a collective of personal acquaintances, the coterie artist
feels enclosed by the social formation of the clique, as it marks the limits of their creative
recognition. Borne out of the desires, ambitions, and grievances of their social life, the
motivations of these figures read as too narrow, too minor – too personal – to be transcendent for
anyone other than the individual. I like how Duggan and Muñoz argue for a dialectic “between
hope and hopelessness” that enables a way of “living with the negative […] living with failure”
in a very quotidian way (in contrast to the “grandiose subjectivity-shattering” version of the
negative that they associate with the antisocial turn of Edelman and Bersani [281]). But “failure,”
in their terms, indicates an implicit collective effort at what Muñoz elsewhere calls “queer world-
making.”
36
What neither Muñoz and Duggan, nor Halberstam, seem to mean by “failure” is the
failure to be judged an artistic genius (or even just as an artist of some credible talent), by either
your peers or the public. This is a primary preoccupation for my subjects, as they navigate their
clique relations. Given the solipsistic quality of this concern, compared with the politically
efficacious value of affects such as “dyke anger” or hopeful dissent, then do the “bad sentiments”
of my subjects also make them “bad objects” for critical analysis?

35
Lisa Duggan and José Esteban Muñoz, “Hope and Hopelessness: a Dialogue,” Women & Performance: a journal
of feminist theory 19, no.2 (July 2009): 277.
36
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University
Press, 2009), 40.
22
The next part of my introduction will engage this question through the case study of Ford
and Tyler’s magazine View. The vehemence of Clement Greenberg’s response to View, I argue,
is bound up in the unstable position of the clique within wartime intellectual discourse. By
looking at the ways in which Greenberg was linked to View, even as he held an extreme hostility
towards it, allows me to consider the attachments that a coterie aesthetics produces, alongside its
negative affects. View’s coterie aesthetics, I suggest, is an example of what Lauren Berlant calls
“cruel optimism.”
37
In analyzing this state as it applied to this magazine, I put into practice the
argument that underpins each of my chapters. The clique’s common affects might lead us
somewhere collective, but whether this version of collectivity is something politically or socially
transformative is doubtful. Regardless of my soft spot for each of the subjects I study, my close
reading of their lives and works doesn’t seek to repair their critical reputation or redeem their
social behavior. Instead, I dwell on the pettinesses and the privileges baked into their social
relations. Exploring the granular details within their interactions might not produce the most
flattering group portrait of these subjects. But it results in an analysis of the limits of community
that is too-often neglected in the scholarship of modernist and queer studies.

Coterie aesthetics, coming into View

Over the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties, in the period of “late” modernism, the coterie
became a way to attack modernist art.
38
In a 1941 address to Columbia University students, the

37
Lauren Berlant’s formulation of “cruel optimism” is a state “where subjectivity is depicted as overwhelmed,
forced to change, and yet also stuck.” Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 21.
38
On “late modernism” as a discrete period of creative activity, see Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture,
and Politics in Cold War America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). While Genter situates late
modernism in the Cold War era, Tyrus Miller’s own version of this period is circumscribed by the two world wars.
See Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of
23
critic Van Wyck Brooks described various modernist works – including those by Eliot, Pound,
Stein, and James Joyce – as “coterie literature,” propagating a forceful image of modernism as
elitist and cliquish.
39
Brooks accused the coterie writer of appealing solely to a narrow audience
of peers, who were connected by a shared nihilistic attitude towards wider society – perhaps
what Halberstam might call an “embrace of a truly political negativity” (110), although the
latter’s examples don’t tend to be drawn from canonical modernism. The insular appeal of these
writers was, to Brooks, indicative of modernism’s failure to match the humanistic values of the
contemporary world in a time of global conflict. But Dwight Macdonald, a critic who prided
himself upon his political and cultural enlightenment, rushed to modernism’s defense in the
magazine Partisan Review. He accused Brooks of being America’s “leading mouthpiece for
totalitarian cultural values” because of his “historical illiteracy.”
40
Rather than a withdrawal from
society, Macdonald reads modernism as a transcendence of it: “In an age of social decay, it is
only by rejecting the specific and immediate values of society that the writer can preserve those
general and eternal human values” (448, Macdonald’s italics). To Macdonald, the negativity of
modernist writers was a sign of their deeper engagement with a more permanent world of
universal “human values.” Macdonald – just like the later weak theorists, Halberstam, and
Muñoz do in different contexts – seeks to recuperate a version of negativity that can serve as an
active, oppositional stance that rejects the hegemonic values of contemporary society.
What is notable in Macdonald’s polemic is that he doesn’t waste much space trying to
defend the “coterie.” Instead, he implicitly argues that Brooks is just misapplying the idea of the
coterie to modernism; rather than operating in the narrow social realm of their peers, modernists

California Press, 1999). Although I am interested in the same historical timeframe as Genter, I subscribe to Miller’s
characterization of late modernism as a period where modernist works represent “internal exhaustion” (Miller, 209).
39
Michelle Taylor discusses Brooks’s address in “(In)discreet Modernism,” 35–6.
40
Dwight Macdonald, “Kulturbolschewismus is Here,” Partisan Review 8, no.6 (November 1941): 446.
24
are addressing values at the widest level of humanity. The pejorative connotations of the
“coterie” thus go unchallenged by Macdonald. That was perhaps just as well for him, considering
his friend and collaborator Clement Greenberg had been attacking less canonical modernist
writers like Ford and Tyler in the same terms as Brooks.
41
The target of Greenberg’s ire was
View, Ford’s art magazine. Over its seven-year lifespan, from 1940 until it went bust in 1947,
View served as New York’s leading forum for Anglo-European surrealism, the first such
magazine on American shores (at least in Ford’s self-aggrandizing account). Ford and Tyler,
View’s associate editor, devoted a series of issues to the individual artists they deemed most
important (including Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and, of course, Tchelitchew). View was also
the site of early English translations of such writers as Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert
Camus, and published leading American poets like Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and
William Carlos Williams. With figures of such clout, View gained a reputation among artistic
circles as a place of cosmopolitan creativity, providing the glimpse of a world seen “through the
eyes of the poet,” as the magazine tagline had it.
42

View was also, Ford bragged in a letter to Tyler, a “clique organ,” one that self-
consciously addressed an audience drawn from the same avant-garde circles who were the
magazine’s primary contributors.
43
In its gossipy attention to the comings and goings of
America’s art world machinations, the coterie aesthetics of View put the sociability of Ford’s
friendship circle into the spotlight alongside their art. It produced the impression of an exclusive

41
Clement Greenberg, “The Renaissance of the Little Mag,” Partisan Review 8, no. 1 (January 1941): 72–6.
42
For more on View see the anthology, View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, 1940–1947, ed. Charles Henri Ford (New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991). For the most comprehensive recent analysis of the magazine, see Tirza True
Latimer, Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2016), 78–111. View also plays an important part in historical narratives of wartime surrealism. See
Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)
and Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920–1950 (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1995).
43
Ford to Tyler, 13 September 1940, in the Parker Tyler Collection, Harry Ransom Center, Box 8, Folder 4.
25
group whose works were inaccessible to a wider public. It was the unabashed nature of this
“clique organ” that so angered Greenberg, who was soon to become the leading critical
proponent of Abstract Expressionism. In Partisan Review (the outlet we might consider the New
York Intellectuals’ own “clique organ”), Greenberg went after the editors of View. To
Greenberg, Ford’s art collective lacked the substantive creative achievements possessed by the
earlier modernist forebearers they sought to emulate. Instead, this coterie relied upon “too much
repetition of the old attitudes, the old affectations, the old stunts” (Greenberg [1941], 73).
Greenberg felt this stale performance was out of place during World War II. The importance of
this political backdrop, one urgently debated in the pages of Partisan Review and elsewhere, was
ignored by View in its identification of “literature and art with its social life” (73). This
identification was, to Greenberg, a sign of deviance. The social life of View’s art world was its
own insular realm that sealed these individuals off from an engagement with more urgent global
problems.
In his attack on View Greenberg performed his estrangement from the exclusive art world
the magazine represented. “The gossip is good if you know the names,” he wrote, “if you know
the people I imagine it might get to be a little too much. Sometimes it is even a little too much
for plain strangers” (73). How quickly View’s gossip congeals from “good” to “too much.” The
position that Greenberg occupies here is unstable. He implies a personal familiarity with “the
people” that View gossips about, and yet claims to also speak for “plain strangers,” estranged and
overwhelmed by the gossip that animates the magazine’s coterie aesthetics. In his description of
the excess that marks View’s social character – “a little too much” – Greenberg suggests that
what is artistically weak about this clique is its strong social ties. To the “plain stranger” of the
general public, the gossip within this exclusive realm, where anyone who is anyone knows
26
everyone, becomes a dizzying list of names drained of meaning. Within this constrictive,
hyperconnected field, social familiarity displaces creative worth as the passport to entry. For
Greenberg, View produces a display of social inbreeding that reveals the stagnancy of
midcentury coterie aesthetics, where the overly familiar participants of this art scene sacrifice the
prospect of aesthetic innovation upon the hamster treadmill of empty gossip.
The stagnancy that Greenberg located in View’s coterie aesthetics was bound up in the
suspect sexual character that he also attached to the magazine. “Gossip,” as we have already
discussed, is not a neutral social activity. Within the cultural discourse of Greenberg’s period, it
harbors the connotation of femininity and homosexuality for those who participated in its mode
of communication. By accentuating View’s gossip, Greenberg is implying that the magazine’s
coterie aesthetics, where an artistic practice is imprinted with the stamp of its social life, is a
breeding ground for the degenerate and perverse. This implied sexual deviancy is partly used to
vindicate the vehemence of Greenberg’s response. He concludes his review of the magazine with
the proclamation: “I am for the extinction of the milieu which has produced this creature” (73).
During a period of international conflict and genocide, Greenberg calls for the extermination of
the weak, effeminate coterie artist. It is a heteronormative desire for “extinction” that rests upon
the perverse output of this queer coterie, an abnormal “production” that runs counter to the
implied societal goal of reproductive futurism.
44

In her analysis of View, Tirza True Latimer argues that Greenberg’s diatribe was a critical
move designed to “to establish the legitimacy of his own agenda” (Latimer, 105). His own
artistic program propagated a form of American cultural nationalism that was distinct from the
degeneracy of European modernist art movements of the pre-war period. View was the foil to

44
For a critique of “reproductive futurism,” see Edelman.
27
Greenberg’s proposal for a “more robust, manly, and disciplined American artistic lineage,” out
of which Abstract Expressionism would emerge as his aesthetic ideal (103). But the vividly
destructive fantasy Greenberg had for View’s coterie “creature” contrasted with the blandness of
the model for artistic production he next proposes. At the conclusion of this survey of various
little magazines, he demanded editors should “try to understand history as well as they are able
[…] If they do this they will have ideas, and if they have ideas they will have programs, and if
they have programs they will take sides” (Greenberg [1941], 76). Overall, this feels pretty tepid,
almost anticlimactic when compared with the venom Greenberg had used when characterizing
View. His proposal for “historical understanding,” “ideas,” and “programs” is vague next to the
specificity of his denunciation of the coterie artist. If the coterie artist is stuck treading water in
the stagnant pond of pre-war modernism, that contrasts with the simplistic plodding of the artist
with “ideas,” who moves unquestioningly forwards across a reductive linear causal trajectory
(the “if they have [blank], they will have [blank]” of Greenberg’s argument).
45

But the thing is, for all the strange mix of vapidity and intensity in Greenberg’s argument,
I must admit he’s got a point. He quotes a letter that appeared in View’s second issue to
exemplify the coterie “creature” he despised. The writer is in France, reporting on their
experience in recently bombed Nantes in a jaunty tone that enrages Greenberg: “‘Nantes was too
lovely […] Nantes was bombarded quite a lot every day but not much got broken but in the end
quite a lot of people had been killed’” (Greenberg, 73). Although clearly global politics is
shaping this description of Nantes, the flippant tone – derivative of Stein, Greenberg suggests –

45
The fuzziness of Greenberg’s argument did, however, have great ideological reach. His call for “more ideas” was
echoed in the patriotic discourses of wartime America, such as the slogan that ran alongside the publication of
massmarket paperbacks for the armed services: “Books are Weapons in the War of Ideas” (quoted in Reid, 121). In
the resonance between Greenberg’s proclamation and such sloganeering, the ideological ramifications of his
argument make their most overt appearance.
28
is jarring when its subject is the death of a substantial number of civilians, even though “not
much got broken.” Latimer, in her extended analysis of View, argues that such irreverence is a
part of Ford and Tyler’s own political arsenal, one to which Greenberg, with his dowdy
insistence upon the historical seriousness of “ideas,” is blind. In Latimer’s reading, View’s
“eclectic” (but not “elite”) artistic taste “amounted to an ideological position” that challenged
“the unifying myths of national and artistic identity then under construction” (Latimer, 79).
Latimer argues that “Ford and his collaborators mobilized the extraordinary as a form of
resistance” (107), but this feels like a stretch. In her analysis of the collaborative practice of
View, Latimer elides the distinction between what is “non-normative” or “different” and what is
a “challenge” or “resistance” to hegemonic power. View might have posed a challenge to certain
aesthetic norms through its mere existence, but to frame it as a form of resistance is to fall into
the recuperative impulse of critical study that overlooks the motivations of the subjects
producing this “clique organ.” In that same letter to Tyler, Ford, after all, writes: “Eclectic
organs never make an impression. All important movements have been cliques” (Ford to Tyler,
13 September 1940). To describe View as “eclectic,” as Latimer does, goes against the grain of
Ford’s own characterization of his magazine’s importance.
A version of Latimer’s argument was also not the one Tyler made to defend View when
he wrote to Partisan Review complaining of Greenberg’s attack. In his letter, Tyler wrote that
Greenberg’s review was so misleading that it betrayed “social responsibility.”
46
What Tyler
meant by this term, however, was grounded in the intricacies of personal relations rather than
anything akin to political “ideas.” He critiqued Greenberg’s review for three reasons: 1)
Greenberg had mislabeled Ford as a surrealist; 2) Greenberg had personal beef with one of

46
Parker Tyler, “View Objects,” letter to the editor, Partisan Review 8, no. 3 (May 1941): 255.
29
View’s main contributors, the surrealist poet Nicolas Calas; and 3) the prank war report from
Nantes was not representative of the rest of View’s output. Of the three claims, two dealing with
artistic misrepresentations, Tyler’s second point is the juiciest. Greenberg, Tyler revealed, was
lashing out against View because “he had been duped by Calas and Kurt Seligmann into
believing they hold his non-serious painting in respect” (Tyler [1941], 255). Greenberg was a
painter as well an art critic and, while he might sound like a “serious” version of the latter, Tyler
was saying he lacked this quality in his paintings. Such a claim also trivialized Greenberg’s
critical work too. Greenberg’s dismissal of View was waved away by Tyler as simply a response
to a negative review of his “non-serious painting” by Calas that was based upon the artworks the
latter had seen on a visit to Greenberg’s apartment. The critic had been “duped” by Calas, but
was now trying to deceive the readers of Partisan Review that he had no personal skin in this
game, by playing the role of “plain stranger” to View’s coterie aesthetics.
Tyler’s ammunition, then, was to continue what View was already being accused of by
Greenberg: he was gossiping, reminding readers of Partisan Review that Greenberg was not
himself immune from identifying “literature and art with its social life,” at least in his own
career. Hardly a “stranger” to New York’s art world, Greenberg’s domestic home was in fact the
setting for one of its dramas.
47
While Greenberg denigrated View’s coterie aesthetics for its
deviancy, Tyler’s objection showed that his critical adversary also dipped his toe in the waters of
this transgressive sociability, through the permeable borders of their overlapping social scenes.
Empty gossip it may be, but the circulatory force of these trivial exchanges enables the coterie
creature to pull Greenberg into its orbit, with the critic reduced to a nugget of minor information
that can be trafficked in turn. Greenberg’s review of View showed a critic, well on his way to

47
A drama that reportedly culminated in a physical altercation between Greenberg and Calas (see Sawin, 152).
30
establishing himself as an authority within postwar artistic discourse, vigilantly patrolling the
boundary line between different creative sensibilities. But, as Tyler’s response shows, the task of
severing an artist’s creative output from the pettinesses of their social life proved to be an unruly,
unmanageable undertaking because of the cloying nature of their shared social experience.
In a private letter to Tyler, replying to Tyler’s printed response to his article, Greenberg
recognized the stickiness of his social attachments. Just as Tyler suggested Greenberg was
betraying “social responsibility,” Greenberg accused Tyler of “treachery” for revealing certain
personal details about his critique and “dishonesty” for omitting important parts of these personal
details in his letter to Partisan Review. But he also lamented the recourse to the social that Tyler
and his “circle” committed: “What viscosities you move in, Parker. And how you people
entangle one in them.”
48
To Greenberg, the personal, social context in which Tyler resides is a
thick, gelatinous “viscosity.” It is a quicksand in which other artists, writers, and critics can
quickly become entangled and sink. The quagmire of the social is hard to avoid. But even as
Greenberg recognizes this capacity for us all to be subsumed by this social viscosity, he also pins
the responsibility for this upon Tyler and the “people” in his circle. What interests me especially
about how the coterie is used within aesthetic judgment is this way in which it flickers between a
general negative experience and a particular negative group.
49
The coterie reflects a certain kind
of universalizable social experience, where any individual can get bogged down by the petty
personal details of their intimate network. This experience is as resonant for Greenberg as it is
for Tyler. But the label of the coterie artist is also attached to a particular minority of subjects –
in this case, attached to Tyler by Greenberg – as a negative evaluation of how a certain type of

48
Greenberg to Tyler, 5 February 1941, in the Parker Tyler Collection, Harry Ransom Center, Box 7, Folder 7.
49
Framed this way, we might think of the “coterie” as an echo of the tension between simultaneously minoritizing
and universalizing understandings of the homosexual-heterosexual binary with which Sedgwick begins
Epistemology of the Closet.
31
artist (either through creative or critical works) participates primarily within, and derives
wayward pleasure from, this viscous social experience.

“Knowing the Names:” Social Connection as Critical Argument

The interaction between View magazine, Greenberg, and Tyler is one example of the dilemma of
social attachment that my subjects face in their status as coterie artists. Over the four chapters of
Clique Modernism, I consider how and why certain figures remain attached to a type of social
relation that does not enhance their position within midcentury hierarchies. This means
recognizing the negative effects of a coterie aesthetic practice, but it is also why I attend to the
pleasures that emerge within an experience of the densely knitted social relations of the clique.
These private pleasures of the coterie are particular to each subject – Ford’s appetite for
intergenerational sex contrasts, for instance, with the impression of celibacy that Toklas
cultivates in her writing. Therefore, rather than claim these four chapters offer one holistic
argument about the coterie that encompasses the individual experiences of all of my subjects, my
project accentuates the haphazard, fluctuating attitude towards of the exclusive set of social
relations in which my subjects participated. In doing so, Clique Modernism seeks to reflect the
midcentury artistic coterie itself, where the intersection of aesthetic and social judgments was felt
most acutely by those subjects “entangled” within its viscous layers.
As a part of this ambition, my chapters highlight the arbitrariness with which a coterie
aesthetic practice was evaluated. There is no single explanation as to how some writers and
artists were judged for their coterie aesthetics and how some, who share the same friends and
bump into each other at the same parties, evaded this judgment. How much an association with
32
the coterie serves as an inditement of an artist was as much to do with that artist’s power, among
both their friendship circles and popular audiences, as it was about their participation within
postwar modernist cliques. Just look at the attack of View by Greenberg next to the defense of
modernism’s “coterie literature” by his friend Macdonald, which appeared in the same
publication, Partisan Review. Here, we can see that the category of the coterie artist is a slippery
and subjective thing – and one that doesn’t necessarily fix an artist to a lifetime of popular
neglect. Figures such as Gertrude Stein and Andy Warhol, as I analyze in chapter three, were
able to parlay a coterie reputation into a platform for gaining popular recognition. By contrast,
popularity was hardly a guarantor of artistic credibility or a personal sense of empowerment, as a
career like Carson McCullers’s could testify. Rather than attempt to iron out these incoherencies,
the narrative of each chapter at times strategically subordinates the argumentative thrust of my
project for the sake of description, so that the inconsistencies of my subjects’ lives, as well as the
coterie at large, are not effaced.
50

Clique Modernism tracks the lives and careers of a group of American artists and writers
over the course of the nineteen-forties, fifties, and sixties. In doing so, it provides a partial
historical narrative of a loose artistic community. By placing a friendship network at the
forefront of each chapter’s analysis, I am making an implicit argument that social relations are
tenebrous but important connections that determine artistic production. The quotidian qualities of
social interactions – the minor decisions that affect who was friends with whom; who was doing
what, when, and where; and how these activities were received by other people – provides a
linkage through which we can analyze the products of artistic creation.

50
This ambition harks back, through the “descriptive turn” that Heather Love champions in “Close But Not Deep,”
to Susan Sontag’s call for an “erotics of art” in place of a hermeneutics, where description supplants
“interpretation.” Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation” (1964) in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, reprint
(London: Penguin, 2009), 14.
33
To reflect this belief, my chapters play a narrative role in describing the social goings-on
of this midcentury artistic community. The chapters orbit around particular situations or events
that are flashpoints for two or three of my subjects, and these moments catalyze the themes and
ideas I explore in other parts of their careers and texts. This is one way that I incorporate a
narrative of this coterie’s social life into my critical study. But by tracking this coterie over
twenty years we are also able to see how figures drift in and out of the story I tell through these
chapters. The haphazard appearances of various art world figures – Dame Edith Sitwell; Lincoln
Kirstein; Tennessee Williams – establishes a dynamic of primary and secondary characters that
Clique Modernism, with its attention on critically understudied figures, would seem to challenge.
Instead, by shifting the focus from certain famous writers to certain less famous writers, my
project is replicating the hierarchies of this social experience, with only the terms of critical
exposure switched. By doing so, I suggest, a study of the clique cannot avoid the power
dynamics that are baked into this social formation. That is also because I don’t believe there
exists some heroic act of critical description that can evade mistreatment of its object of
interpretation.
In lieu of a chapter summary, I finish this introduction with a brief map of the subjects
and the social relations I am writing about, as they evolve over my four chapters. Chapter One
begins in 1948, after View had folded and Charles Henri Ford was working out what next to do
with his time. Ford is antagonized by the presence of Gore Vidal and Truman Capote in his
social scene, as these two up-and-coming writers were making waves with recently published
novels about male homosexuality. Through an analysis of Ford’s diary of the period between
1948 and 1957, I use the tensions in Ford’s interactions with these two young novelists – as well
as the tensions between Vidal and Capote, and between Ford and his partner Pavel Tchelitchew –
34
to explore differing representations of male homosexual desire within midcentury literary
communities. The homosexual desire represented by Ford is one that foregrounds inegalitarian,
intergenerational sexual relations such as pederasty. As such, it accentuates the monstrous
deviancy of the coterie “creature” and the desires that circulate within the exclusive parameters
of the clique. When compared with the public appreciation of Vidal and Capote’s novels of
homosexual youth, I argue that in the sex life of Ford we see a latent generational anxiety that is
bound up in his association with the coterie.
Capote appears again in Chapter Two, cited by the critic Leslie Fiedler as the example of
a fashionable style of writing that is popular with readers of women’s magazines such as
Harper’s Bazaar. Although these magazines allow for a wide audience reach, Fiedler claims that
the authors who write for them become coterie artists due to the gendered nature of these
publication outlets, which are consumed primarily by women. My main focus in this chapter is
on two of Capote’s friends – Jane Bowles and Carson McCullers – who are dealing with the
“problematic of the popular” in different ways. There is little escaping its belittling effects for
these two writers. McCullers’s status was diminished in her literary reception because of her
success with a popular audience. Bowles, on the other hand, was criticized in similar terms
because she failed to achieve this popularity. Instead, she took on a particular exemplary force,
one that peers such as Alice Toklas gossiped over as a sign of the weaknesses of a coterie
aesthetic practice. I analyze Bowles’s play In the Summer House and its critical reception in
1954 to explore the ways she dramatizes the trouble she had relinquishing the intimate ties of her
goony friends in her creative practice.
After playing antagonist to Bowles, Toklas then takes center stage in Chapter Three, as I
consider the publication of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which, like Bowles’s play, appeared
35
in 1954. Toklas’s memoir-cum-recipe book was a hit with the public, like the writing of
McCullers and Capote. I analyze it as Toklas’s attempt at a coterie aesthetic practice that seeks to
preserve herself as a fundamentally “private” figure, even as she was courting sustained public
attention through the book’s publication. This, I argue, reflects the tension that Gertrude Stein
had set up for Toklas in her famous memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). In
both Stein and Toklas’s works, we see an unstable portrait of lesbian desire tied to the strange
representation they make of their position within a coterie. I compare this sexual opacity to the
early career of Andy Warhol who, in the nineteen-fifties, was producing his own coterie
aesthetics, one that he would later use as a way to leverage public attention in the Pop Art years
of the nineteen-sixties. In 1959, Warhol also published a cookbook, a pastiche of the culinary
excess of Toklas’s Francophile recipes. How the gastronomic affects the libidinal charge of these
two artists, both of whom cultivated profiles of sexual abstinence, is the focal point of this
chapter’s comparison.
Chapter Four returns to the View crowd who frame my historical account of this art
world. After beginning with its advent in 1940, in this chapter I turn to look at this community
from the vantage point of 1968, through the intertwined reception to Ford’s partner, the Russian
painter Tchelitchew, and Ford’s close friend and collaborator, Parker Tyler. In 1968, Tyler had
just published the book to which he’d devoted the majority of that decade, his biography of
Tchelitchew. The biography was an ambivalent tribute not only to this artist (who had died
eleven years earlier), but to the practice of coterie aesthetics itself. In The Divine Comedy of
Pavel Tchelitchew, Tyler tries to work out how he can articulate the artistic and personal value of
a painter whose works are suffused by an obsession with his social life. Tyler’s difficulties
worked in tandem with the satirical treatment that he had received from Gore Vidal in his novel
36
Myra Breckinridge, published twenty years after Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, one of the texts
I analyze in chapter one. What idea of the clique is produced in these very different depictions of
coterie artists? In the grand claims made by Tyler and Vidal in their respective tributes I claim
that we see the negative realm of social intimacy persisting in spite of the unhappiness it
produces for this network of artists and writers.
Clique Modernism ends with me mulling over the idea of “ambivalence,” a term I have
used frequently in this introduction, and use frequently throughout my chapters. Often my
readings end on “ambivalence” as a final analytical takeaway about my subjects and their
representation of their social relations. What worries me about how I use “ambivalence” is a fear
that it stands as a placeholder for some more precise feeling that I don’t have the wherewithal to
articulate, let alone analyze. Does ambivalence, I ask in my conclusion, feel “old hat” as an
interpretative endpoint for modernist studies? Is a dissertation that harps on about it (or
negativity, or weakness…) unhappily guilty of “too much repetition of the old attitudes, the old
affections, the old stunts” of a queer studies past, as Greenberg wrote about View (Greenberg
[1941], 73)? This insecurity is one that has loomed over me as I have worked on my dissertation.
In my conclusion, I suggest ways that these issues might have loomed over the experiences of
my starring subjects in Clique Modernism, too.

37
CHAPTER ONE
THE GENERATION GAME: CHARLES HENRI FORD, ARTISTIC ADOLESCENCE, AND
PEDERASTY

Clement Greenberg wasn’t the only hater of View, the “clique organ” founded by Charles Henri
Ford in 1940. André Breton, the self-professed founder of Surrealism, also disliked this
magazine, which he judged a weak imitation of his own artistic movement. Breton was in
America during World War II, one of the many artists who crossed the Atlantic fleeing the
conflict in Europe. While Breton had enjoyed a brief dalliance with View over in the United
States, it wasn’t long before he set up his own surrealist mag called VVV, ostensibly because the
array of artists in Ford’s publication was too diffuse to function as an official Surrealist platform.
Ford and his collaborator Parker Tyler understood the “V” that Breton used in his magazine title
as a nod to View, acknowledging it as a rival. But VVV, which lasted only four issues from 1942
to 1944, used many of the same artists and writers as Ford’s magazine. In fact, the major
difference between the two publications, and the underlying reason for Breton’s distaste for
View, was the sexual character of its editors. Breton’s well-established homophobia stood in
jarring contrast to the queer sexual play of Ford, Tyler, and the milieu in which they
participated.
1
While, in his critical review which I discussed in my introduction, Greenberg had
insinuated this coterie’s sexual deviancy by highlighting their love of gossip, Breton was more
explicit in how he defined View’s sexual character. Ford’s magazine, Breton snickered privately
to friends, should be called “pederasty international” because of the sexual behavior of its editors
(quoted in Latimer, 102).

1
On how Breton’s homophobia applied to his relationship with View, see Mark Polizotti, Revolution of the Mind:
The Life of André Breton (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 503.
38
Breton used the word “pederasty,” a term that describes intergenerational sex acts
between adult men and pubescent or adolescent boys, to emphasize the wider deviancy he
ascribed to View and its artistic circle. In Breton’s usage, “pederasty” functioned as a catch-all
insult that conflated this particular sexual practice with male homosexuality at large, alongside
other sex acts and identities that were considered abnormal in midcentury society. An association
with pederasty, and the other non-normative sexual practices that stewed within this term,
heightened the perversity of the coterie artist. In the contained space of the clique – which Breton
implies was a malformation of a politically-engaged, leftist “international” movement – no end
of wayward sexual behaviors could thrive.
In this chapter I take Breton’s homophobic slur and run with it. More than in any of my
other chapters, here my analysis establishes the linkage produced by the coterie that connects a
deviant sexual behavior with a deviant aesthetic practice. However, while Breton tactically
wielded the term rather loosely, tarring various sexual practices with the same brush, this chapter
considers “pederasty” with more specificity. The thing is, Ford was a pederast, in the sense that
as an older man he had a sexual desire for, and had sexual activity with, male adolescents. His
published diary Water from a Bucket, which he kept between 1948 and 1957 – the year of his
partner Pavel Tchelitchew’s death – records multiple sexual encounters with teenage boys,
alongside more frequent moments where he fantasizes over them.
2
“O adolescent boys of Paris,”
he asks during one such sexual reverie, at the age of forty-five years old, “why do I continue to
dream that you have something to give me?” (Ford [2001], 157). This attraction to underage

2
Although this diary was only published (in edited form) in 2001, Ford was trying to find a publisher for a version
of it as early as the nineteen-sixties. While the fact that Ford edited his diary for publication almost fifty years after
it was first written disrupts any naïve reading of the text as an objective historical artefact of the midcentury period, I
understand Water from a Bucket as its own kind of artwork produced by Ford, one that records a lived experience of
the period but which was also written and arranged as an extended, and final, act of literary creation (Ford died a
year after the diary’s publication, in 2002).
39
youths was a part of Ford’s wider ethos of libidinal excess: “ready to fuck the world,” is how
Tchelitchew described him (143), and he didn’t intend it as a compliment. But, for Ford, sexual
pleasure provided its own moral judgment: “anything that brings two people closer is,
theoretically, good – even to eating each other’s excrements” (33). This location of the “good”
within the intimacy of coprophagic acts showcases Ford’s sexual bravado – we can imagine the
“shit-eating” grin on his face while he penned that statement – and his willingness to
countenance a capacious range of transgressive pleasure-giving activities. Pederasty was, at least
implicitly, included in this sexual worldview.
In spite of the ethical stance he ascribes to sexual pleasure, Ford doesn’t seem to perceive
any moral conundrum in his sexual attraction towards teenage boys. Generally, he seems pretty
undisturbed by this desire. “Fourteen, fourteen, is any age more charming?” Ford asks, for at
fourteen a boy has “that balance between a child of thirteen and the full puberty of fifteen” (160).
These aren’t the musings of a man grappling with his sexual conscience. The blithe attitude Ford
has about his pederasty is hard to square with our contemporary understanding of sexual
relations. As a result, recent analyses of Ford have tended to avoid this particular elephant in the
room. Alexander Howard’s book-length study of Ford barely touches upon this facet of his
sexual desire.
3
In the introduction to Water from a Bucket, Lynne Tillman chooses to equivocate
when facing it: “the contemporary reader may be […] disturbed or pleased by his ecstatic
evocations and lust for teenage boys.”
4
These acts of evasion, which at most reference his
pederasty as some sort of unfortunate, extraneous detail, fail to address how central pederasty
was to Ford’s sexual identity. In his attraction to adolescents, Ford occupied different roles,

3
See Alexander Howard, Charles Henri Ford: Between Modernism and Postmodernism (London: Bloomsbury,
2017).
4
Lynne Tillman, “Cut Up Life,” in Water from a Bucket, xii.
40
providing mentorship and guidance to these teens while also using them for bragging rights in
the coterie of artists and writers with whom he fraternized. “Do you think my child is beautiful?”
he asks W. H. Auden, referring to his fifteen-year-old lover “Vito.” “Very,” Auden replies (Ford
[2001], 221). In interactions like this one, we can see how a shared pederastic desire was used by
Ford as a basis for his social relations, one that – as we have already seen in Breton’s remark –
shaped perceptions of Ford as an artist.
Ford’s pederasty makes him, and the coterie artist he represents in my project, difficult to
place within an ameliorative narrative about the development of sexually marginal artistic
communities in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Why exhort readers to study an
overlooked writer whose sexual behavior we judge as beyond the pale of twenty-first century
moral standards? But Ford is one of the “impossible subjects” who the queer historian Martha
Umphrey argues we need to reckon with precisely because of the trouble he stirs up for our
contemporary understanding of modern sexuality.
5
These troublesome figures present a different
set of “unruly” desires to the ones Jack Halberstam champions as a platform for a “truly political
negativity” (Halberstam, 109). Pederasty doesn’t chime with the political utility that can be
found for negativity within this version of queer theory. Rather, as Kadji Amin notes, “modern
pederasty is the detritus of Queer Studies’ orientation toward political futurity.”
6
Who would
want to repurpose this set of power-imbalanced sexual relations for a politically radical, queer
critical practice?

5
Martha M. Umphrey, “The Trouble with Harry Shaw,” Radical History Review 62 (1995): 12. The historian
Rachel Hope Cleves has recently discussed similar issues with her biography of Norman Douglas, a modernist
pederast who was somewhat of a cause célèbre during his lifetime (Ford refers to him twice in his diary [35; 148]).
See Cleves, Unspeakable: A Life beyond Sexual Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).
6
Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2017), 34. Alan Sinfield describes the “embarrassment” of age-differentiated relationships in his
analysis of pederasty. See Sinfield, On Sexuality and Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 113–8.
41
My argument is not to condemn (nor, certainly, is it to justify) Ford’s pederasty, in light
of the power imbalances that structure age-differentiated sexual relations and their capacity for
exploitation. Instead, through an analysis of Ford’s pederasty, I explore three concerns that orbit
around the construction of the coterie artist. The first is implicit in Breton’s comment, which is
both homophobic and uncomfortably accurate, at least with regards to Ford. Just because certain
types of sexual “deviancy” are stigmatized does not mean that they can be recuperated for the
utopian queer politics championed by theorists like Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz.
7
My
second concern builds on this point, as I locate a certain strand of negativity – one from which a
utopian impulse cannot be retroactively recovered – within sexual desire, a foundational site of
pleasure (or, at least, a foundational site of where we hope pleasure should be locatable). This
intermingling of the negative with the pleasurable, I argue, takes place in the relationship
between Ford’s negative feelings about his limited artistic status and his positive feelings about
his sexual attraction towards teenage boys. By looking specifically at pederasty I come to my
third concern. In Water from a Bucket Ford, consciously or not, constructs a parallel between his
attraction to adolescents and his sense of himself as “an adolescent – in looks and achievement”
(Ford [2001], 149). The primary focus of my chapter is to show how this sense of creative and
physical immaturity inflects Ford’s sexual behavior, due to the associative proximity between his
pederasty and the generational uncertainty Ford experiences during this period. In its problematic
intergenerational mixing, pederasty reflects Ford and his coterie aesthetic practice, as he stands
exposed as simultaneously too old and too young for public artistic recognition at midcentury.
Ford constructs this sense of inferiority through the relationship that occupies the most
central position in his life (if not his sexual activity). Ford had met the charismatic,

7
See Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure and José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. For a more sustained
grappling with this scholarship as it pertains to my research, see my introduction.
42
temperamental Russian painter Tchelitchew in the early nineteen-thirties, when he was scurrying
around Paris with his lover of the time, Djuna Barnes.
8
Before too long, Ford and Tchelitchew
had ditched their respective partners and by 1934 they were living together in the United States.
This relationship was not always harmonious. There was only a nine-year age gap between them,
but in terms of artistic status Ford felt significantly junior to his new beau. Although, as I discuss
in chapter four, Tchelitchew never received the public recognition he felt he deserved, he was
understood – by friends, Ford, and himself – to wield significantly more clout than his partner,
who was yet to really find his artistic stride. This dynamic continued on into the nineteen-forties.
While Ford was busy building his “clique organ” with View, Tchelitchew completed his painting
Hide-and-Seek, which in 1942 was exhibited in the permanent collection of the Museum of
Modern Art and fast became one of that institution’s most popular paintings.
9
Tchelitchew, once
he’d achieved mass audience appreciation with this work, was predictably snobbish about its
worth: Hide-and-Seek, he claimed, “withdraws its images from the Sunday crowds” (Ford
[2001], 16). But by 1948, Tchelitchew’s status had congealed a little. “The ‘art boom’ is off,”
Ford reports in his diary, “and Pavlik [Tchelitchew] is in a continual panic over his finances” (6).
Ford was also worried about his own creative stagnancy in the postwar period. View had gone
bust in 1947, and – besides a collection of poetry that appeared in 1949 – his published output in

8
For more on the love affair between Ford and Barnes, see Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna
Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995), 171–84.
9
On the painting’s popularity, see Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the
Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 227. In a 1965 short story, the writer Harvey Swados
reflects the decline of Tchelitchew’s reputation through his assessment of this painting. The narrator of “A Story for
Teddy” describes a trip to MoMA in the late nineteen-fifties: “We stood before the big canvas that used to be
everybody’s favorite in those old days before everybody went totally abstract. It was by Tchelitchew, it was called
Hide and Seek, and it’s too bad it didn’t get burned up in the fire they had not so long ago.” See Harvey Swados, “A
Story for Teddy” in Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn: Collected Stories of Harvey Swados (New York: Viking,
1986), 199–224, 203.
43
the next ten years was minimal. He seems adrift in this era. “The unbearable thing,” he wrote to
Tyler in 1952, “is to go on being as you are when you’re dissatisfied” (quoted in Howard, 150).
Ford’s dissatisfaction also stemmed from his relationship with Tchelitchew. The years
between 1948 and 1957 marked an especially fractious time for the couple, as they each
acclimatized (or, perhaps more accurately, failed to acclimatize) to their diminished artistic status
in the post-World War II creative landscape. These tensions are documented in Ford’s diary,
which encompasses their final years in America and their move to Europe, where they mainly
bounced between France and Italy until Tchelitchew’s death from heart failure. Ford recounts a
series of dramatic arguments, one of which culminated in him throwing a glass of milk in his
partner’s face (149). Water from a Bucket portrays two unhappy, embittered figures, and one of
the major sources of tension between the pair was the comparative youth of Ford next to
Tchelitchew. While in 1948 both artists were fairly ensconced in middle-age (Ford was forty,
Tchelitchew forty-nine), during their arguments their relationship takes on the form of a battle
between the generations, a situation exacerbated by the painter’s increasingly poor health. In the
diary, Ford depicts Tchelitchew’s anguish that he looks “like a 75-year-old man,” an accelerated
ageing that he blames on Ford: “you have eaten me to pieces” (149). By contrast, Ford is the
Dorian-like youth “who drinks his [Tchelitchew’s] blood, lives on him, remains young while he
grows old” (147). Although Tchelitchew’s health was undoubtedly deteriorating, the parasitical
youthfulness of Ford also served as metaphor for his subordinate position in their relationship.
Even as their artistic reputations declined, Ford was still Tchelitchew’s “satellite,” “one famous
artist and one obscure poet” (117). This power imbalance fed into the perception Ford and
Tchelitchew shared about the age difference of their relationship.
44
But Ford’s age anxiety wasn’t just shaped by his most intimate relationship. He also felt
generationally displaced among his peers. He was alienated from the writers and artists who had
made their name in modernist scenes prior to World War II, such as his former partner Barnes,
who he describes as “a real ruin, compared to what she was twenty years ago” (101). But he was
also detached from the creative figures who were beginning to establish themselves in the
postwar era. James Laughlin, the publisher behind the house New Directions, gave Ford one
backhanded compliment: “‘You’re not so old […] I always think of you as belonging to the
generation before me,’ he said” (33). While Ford’s retort was a good one – “‘And I always think
of you as a contemporary, late in getting started,’” – it doesn’t shift the power dynamic in their
relations. When Ford returned the corrected proofs of his book of poetry to Laughlin, which New
Directions was publishing, he notes: “he was amiable, though he didn’t encourage me to submit
any excerpts from my journals to the next ND [New Directions] annual” (46). Ford’s publishing
opportunities here are dependent upon the social cues of his late-starting “contemporary,” who
was six years his junior. Even as Ford’s modernist pedigree extends back to the late-nineteen-
twenties, he remains dislocated, feeling like he arrived both too soon and too late to occupy a
position of creative significance in the artistic movements he cherished. His generational
displacement leaves him socially disempowered, reliant upon the informal patronage of his peers
for sporadic acts of “encouragement.”
10

My chapter focuses on Ford’s relationship with two figures of the postwar literary scene
who seemed to especially rile him. Ford was no intimate of Truman Capote or Gore Vidal, but in
the glancing encounters that he records in his diary (as well as those that are recorded elsewhere
in accounts of mid-twentieth-century American literary communities) we see a latent tension in

10
For more on Laughlin, see Gregory Barnhisel, James Laughlin, New Directions Press, and the Remaking of Ezra
Pound (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).
45
Ford’s interactions with these two younger writers. In the next section, I discuss the motivations
behind Ford’s irritation. His encounters with Capote and Vidal, I suggest, circle around questions
of public recognition, age difference, and homosexuality, all questions that relate to the troubling
matter of Ford’s pederasty. Ford felt particularly threatened by Capote and Vidal, I argue,
because of how they constructed their queer literary profiles in the postwar era. In 1948, Vidal’s
third novel The City and the Pillar was published, followed shortly by Capote’s debut Other
Voices, Other Rooms. Both novels were bildungsroman, with narratives about the maturation of
male homosexual adolescents. And yet, even as this subject matter was deemed shocking by
critics, Capote and Vidal found a popular audience eager to consume works about gay male
characters, with both books enjoying lengthy spells on the New York Times bestseller list.
11
For
all the famed rivalry between Capote and Vidal – based upon their literary differences as well as
their personal dislike of one another – they were joined together as a part of a “new generation”
of writers who were, as the title of a feature about postwar writers in LIFE put it, “ready to tackle
almost anything.”
12
This was a literary generation from which Ford felt distinctly estranged.
While in this chapter I explore some of the differences between Capote and Vidal’s
literary styles and author profiles, I emphasize the parallels between them, focusing upon the
similarities of their representations of male homosexuality as a problem of maturation. This
theme of the male homosexual’s arrested development is, in different ways, set out in both their
novels; both Capote and Vidal depict gay male characters who remain stuck, unable to mature.
The resolution to this problem is located outside of their texts, in the public author profiles
Capote and Vidal performed. For all their emphasis on youth, their respective author profiles

11
Vidal was keen to note that while his novel reached number seven on this list, Capote’s only made it to number
eleven. See Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 257.
12
“Young U.S. Writers: A Refreshing Group of Newcomers on the Literary Scene Is Ready to Tackle Almost
Anything,” LIFE 22, no. 22 (2 June 1947): 75–83.
46
show models of the homosexual all grown-up, made palatable to a popular audience because of
their existence as a “creative” type. Ford, with the private record of his pederasty, did not make
such a public leap into maturity as a queer artist. In the various, interconnected dilemmas of his
social, sexual, and creative life, Ford instead offers us an exemplary case of the arrested
development of the coterie artist.

Ford, Vidal, Capote: homosexuality across the literary generations

Gore Vidal first met Charles Henri Ford as he was unleashed onto America’s postwar art world
with the publication of Williwaw in 1946. With his debut novel, Vidal was already encouraging
the public to identify his author profile with his subject matter. Set on an Army supply ship in
World War II, mirroring Vidal’s own wartime service, Williwaw positioned its twenty-year-old
author as a butch, battle-hardened, serious young novelist, ready to storm the literary
marketplace.
13
In these initial stages of his career, Vidal kept his public identity unmarked from
an association with homosexuality; this came later, first with the publication of The City and the
Pillar in 1948, and then in the wake of his outspoken views on sex acts and sexual liberty in the
nineteen-sixties.
14
But for now, in 1946, Vidal seemed content that his sexual identity wasn’t a
part of his author profile. In fact, he was currently in a romantic – albeit purportedly non-sexual

13
This marketplace was saturated with young male writers looking to play this role. Norman Mailer, a later rival of
Vidal’s, offers the most substantive example with his hefty 1948 war novel The Naked and the Dead which is set
during the Philippines Campaign. Other novels that were based on their author’s wartime experiences included
Burns’s The Gallery (1947), Vance Bourjaily’s The End of My Life (1947), and Alfred Hayes’s All Thy Conquests
(1946) and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949). Merle Miller wrote a best-selling debut That Winter (1948), which
was about veterans returning to America. James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951), and the film that followed
two years later, shows the commercial potential of this genre of World War II American novels.
14
For an extensive reading of Vidal’s public association with his sexuality, one that revolves around a public outing
performed by William Buckley Jr., see Guy Davidson, “Embarrassment in 1968: Gore Vidal’s Sexuality in the
Public Sphere,” Mosaic 48, no. 1 (March 2015): 147–64.
47
– relationship with Anaïs Nin, a figure who, like Ford, straddled prewar and postwar modernist
circles.
15
The forty-three-year-old Nin served as a mentor to Vidal, providing him with a gateway
into the social world of midcentury artistic communities. Vidal recalled one party in this new
social world, hosted by Peggy Guggenheim, where he was accosted by Ford:
Ford, the bright-eyed poet-novelist-editor and friend of Tchelitchev [sic],
approached me and said, ‘You can’t be a good writer because you have
such lovely legs!’ Years later I came to enjoy Charles Henri, but for a
twenty-year-old soldier still thinking about politics in New Mexico, this
was too much. I turned to James Agee, a tall, sadly amiable man with
bloodshot eyes […] I told Agee that I’d like to break poor Charles’s legs.
Agee was soothing; then he said, most thoughtfully, ‘These fairies can be
surprisingly tough.’
16

The humor of Vidal’s recollection navigates a series of concerns revolving around artistic status,
sexual presentation, and generational difference. Looked at in one light, the power is clearly with
Ford and the punchline lands on Vidal, the insecure young man who is antagonized by the camp
humor of his new surroundings. Ford’s flippant remark dismisses Vidal’s creative stature,
reducing him to a youthful object of desire. In response, Vidal displays an overdetermined,
aggressive form of masculinity that is out of proportion to the initial comment. His reaction to
Ford’s offhand approval of his legs is to express a violent wish to break Ford’s own. The young
novelist is guilty of an absurd overreaction that Vidal mocks in his later recollection.
But for all that Vidal’s anecdote would appear to grant victory to Ford, it is not exactly a
flattering portrayal of him. Ford may be “tough,” in Agee’s speculative estimation, but he is still
a “fairy.” Vidal diminishes Ford’s artistic status through the hyphenated flatlining of his job
description (“poet-novelist-editor”), sandwiched between oblique references to his eagerness

15
The level of romantic involvement in Nin and Vidal’s love affair is uncertain, in part because Vidal’s vociferous
disparagement of Nin in his memoir contrasts with the portrait of the affair provided by Nin in her diary. Both
writers had the capacity to be unreliable in their description of real-life events. Nevertheless, they seem to agree that
the affair was (at least mostly) sex-free.
16
Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (New York: Abacus, 1995), 114.
48
(“bright-eyed”) and sexual identity (“friend of Tchelitchev”). Ford’s social buoyancy is wrapped
up in the trivial artistic sensibility that he represents, where a pair of good legs can discount
literary worth. Flitting between cocktail parties, Ford represents a certain effete social type, that
of the coterie artist. Just like Greenberg when he raged about View, Vidal finds Ford “too much.”
Ford’s camp frivolity is deemed excessive, subsuming aesthetic judgments with evaluations of
physical appearance. At the end of the anecdote, this overwhelming behavior of Ford is finally
labeled and classified, when the more socially experienced Agee clocks him as a “fairy.” The
anecdote about Ford thus becomes a staging post for Vidal’s own reflection on his maturation as
a young writer. Whereas in 1946 he reacted with disproportionate violence to Ford’s camp
excess, Vidal can now look back and admit that he “came to enjoy Charles Henri” in his later
years. Such enjoyment is predicated upon Vidal’s implied distance from this “fairy” sexual
identity category and the frivolous social behavior that Ford represented as a coterie artist.
Two years later, in 1948, Ford describes an encounter with Vidal in his diary, where the
stakes were generational in a different way. When a group of poets gathered for a LIFE
photoshoot at Gotham Book Mart to commemorate Dame Edith Sitwell and her brother Sir
Osbert, Ford understood this as a matter for posterity. The event included such luminaries as W.
H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, and Stephen Spender, all
clustering around the seated Sitwells for the photograph. Ford was there as a friend of Edith’s,
who he knew via Tchelitchew (who in turn possessed an intense relationship with the virginal
British poet and art patron). Through this connection, Ford was able to position himself at the
center of the image, cast as a “bright-eyed,” boyish figure sitting cross-legged on the floor at the
feet of the Sitwells, a model of youthful exuberance. In his pose, Ford was not only establishing
his relative youthfulness next to the aged-looking Sitwells. He was also suggesting his direct
49
participation within a poetic lineage where he played heir apparent to these English aristocrats.
This was, he joked to the artist Brion Gysin, the “the way it should have been – in the lap of the
gods.”
17
In the generational structure of the photograph, Ford’s place “in the lap” of the Sitwells
did the work of carving out a smaller, more intimate family portrait for posterity
The impression that the photograph gave to the mass audience of LIFE’s readership is
one of an elite artistic coterie, comprised of established poets and newly minted writers on the
rise. That prospect alone was enticing enough for Vidal to muscle his way into the photograph,
overcoming the seemingly strict rule that stipulated the picture only included poets.
18
In stark
contrast to Ford, Vidal lurks in the background of the picture, captioned by LIFE as a “Novelist-
Poet,” standing next to the equally dubious-sounding “Playwright-Poet” Tennessee Williams.
19

Claire Seiler reads these awkward caption descriptions as reflective of a “midcentury literary
variety” and “vitality” that was bursting the seams of traditional artistic categories.
20
But to my
mind, the clunkiness of Vidal’s hyphenated label (one that he later passed onto “poet-novelist-
editor” Ford) is more a sign of editorial fudging than of expansive literary sphere.
What such labels glossed over were the social machinations of the picture’s composition.
Ford, who had helped LIFE to organize the photoshoot, chafed at Vidal’s appearance. His
annoyance is noticeable in his clipped description of the episode in his diary: “one of the editors,
Mrs Feldkamp, let me see the list and I asked what Gore Vidal’s name was doing there. ‘He

17
Gysin later popularized the “cut-up technique” with his friend William Burroughs in the nineteen-fifties.
18
This regulation was so stringent that William Saroyan, the Armenian-American novelist whose immigrant fiction
had received popular attention in the early nineteen-forties, felt so snubbed by his exclusion that he vowed to never
set foot in Gotham Book Mart again. (see Erwin R. Tiongson, “The Most Famous Photograph of Poets Ever Taken,”
Slate [11 December 2019], https://slate.com/culture/2019/12/photo-elizabeth-bishop-marianne-moore-auden-
tennessee-williams.html).
19
For the photo-article in LIFE, see “The Sitwells: LIFE Reports Visit to U.S. by Celebrated Literary Team of Edith
and Brother Osbert,” LIFE 25, no.23 (6 December 1948): 164–72. The photograph is on p.169.
20
Claire Seiler, Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2020), 2.
50
never wrote poetry,’ I said. ‘He said he had,’ she said, so there he was by mistake, and will be”
(Ford [2001], 19). Ford observes Vidal’s imposter-status (he was there “by mistake”), one that,
while it might dupe a gatekeeper of mass cultural products like Mrs Feldkamp, failed to pull the
wool over Ford’s discerning eyes. But in spite of his irritation, Ford is resigned. He knows that
his own awareness of Vidal’s maneuvering will be effaced by the photo’s function as a pseudo-
objective record for literary posterity (“there he was […] and will be”). His judgment is no match
for the history-making that a feature article in LIFE magazine enacts. With the Gotham Book
Mart photograph, Vidal was affixed publicly within New York’s literary scene, a part of a
projected image of a social network that would circulate through the propelling force of LIFE’s
audience reach.
21

Vidal, too, was well-aware that he was playing for posterity when he snuck into the
Gotham Book Mart photograph. “I cannot think of a photograph more often reproduced,” he
wrote in his memoir, “as almost everyone present in the picture is the subject of multitudinous
biographies” (Vidal [1995], 250). Certainly, he was including himself as one of these subjects (a
biography by Fred Kaplan was to appear a few years after the publication of Vidal’s memoir) –
although the “almost everyone” suggests that he might have had Ford in mind too as he looked
back on this image in 1995.
Vidal used this memory to recount his triumph over another writer, one who hadn’t even
made it to the party, let alone into the pages of that issue of LIFE magazine. Truman Capote, at
least in Vidal’s gloating reminiscence, had seethed over the appearance of his perennial rival in
the Gotham Book Mart photograph. As Tennessee Williams, their mutual friend, hovered

21
For a recent journalistic account of the photograph see Tiongson. Besides Seiler, who uses the Gotham Book Mart
as a jumping off point for her introduction in Midcentury Suspension, Timothy Yu uses the photograph to analyze
the orientalist logics to postwar modernism in “‘The Hand of a Chinese Master’: José Garcia Villa and Modernist
Orientalism,” MELUS 29, no.1 (Spring 2004): 41–59.
51
helplessly by, attempting to keep the peace, Capote harangued Vidal, echoing the same
accusation Ford had made about the young writer: “‘You’re not a poet,’” he hissed (Vidal [1995],
250). This accusation soon descended into a slanging match over their respective writing styles,
where each belittled the other for a lack of artistic originality. While Vidal said Capote lifted his
stories from Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, Capote retorted that Vidal stole his narratives
from tabloid newspapers, a jab at the mundane sensationalism of his contemporary’s prose.
22
It
was a dispute that betrayed the anxiety both these authors felt as they emerged on the postwar
literary scene. The question of originality was also a question of credentials: who could make a
better claim for themselves as an artist worthy of recognition?
In this context, Vidal’s appearance in the Gotham Book Mart photograph did the work of
legitimizing his literary profile to a mass American public. As a self-promotional tool, it enabled
him to reach a widescale audience while placing him within a prestigious midcentury artistic
community. In this image, the vision of a literary coterie actually gave a collective security to its
members, as the representation of an elite social network offered validation to Vidal’s artistic
status. It assured the public that this “Novelist-Poet” stood as an equal to, and not just an imitator
of, established poetic talents. No wonder Capote was envious that Vidal had availed himself of
this opportunity.
Social creature that he was, Capote’s image didn’t lend itself to the group photograph, for
his ambition was to always “dominate the visual field” (Solomon, 35). In contrast to the
“relatively unmarked masculine style” of Vidal, Capote developed a public profile of

22
The similarities between Capote’s style and the writing of Welty and McCullers was noted by a number of critics,
including McCullers, who later accused her former friend Capote of plagiarizing her work. See Virginia Spencer
Carr, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (London: Peter Owen, 1977), 432. I discuss this
difficult relationship more in chapter two.
52
otherworldly strangeness that readily singled him out as effeminate, childlike, and queer.
23
Vidal
was keen to dismiss this effeminate version of homosexuality by tying it to the inauthenticity he
perceived in Capote’s writing style. Echoing his accusation that Capote “stole” from Southern
Gothic writers like McCullers and Welty, Vidal later remarked that, rather than a prose style, his
writing possesses only “that peculiar interior decorator’s way he [Capote] has of constructing a
Saks Fifth Avenue window and calling it a novel” (quoted in Kaplan, 249). The effeminate
sexual character of “interior decorator” expresses Vidal’s disgust at Capote’s particular brand of
literary window dressing. To Vidal, this act of decorating only required a keen eye for other
people’s talents and a willingness to arrange these stylistic adornments into the shop front of
one’s own fiction. Vidal read Capote’s singular literary profile as a part of his capacity for self-
promotion, one that was steeped in an effeminate, queer duplicity that veiled his lack of genuine
talent.
Vidal wasn’t the only one who disparaged Capote in these terms. Ford was also hostile to
Capote because of what he saw as the younger writer’s incessant networking. In his diary, he
notes Capote’s “depressing” commercial opportunism (Ford [2001], 142) and, in his accounts of
their personal interactions, Ford heightened Capote’s desperation to get ahead. During one
encounter in October 1949, he relishes the look of “high disapproval” with which Tchelitchew
snubbed Capote’s social advances. In this characterization, Capote takes on the slippery traits of
his ambitions: “he gave the impression, while climbing the steps to the bar, that he was climbing
them like a short caterpillar – and also at the bar, which he hung against as if holding onto it with
caterpillar legs along his body – clinging” (64). The “clinging” behavior of Capote, his straining
desperation for an introduction to Tchelitchew, turns him zoomorphic. He is a “caterpillar,”

23
Guy Davidson, “Just a Couple of Fags: Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and Celebrity Feud,” Celebrity Studies 7,
no.3 (2016): 296. For more on Capote’s “strangeness,” see Solomon, 25–52.
53
looking to make another step in his many-legged ascent up the greasy pole of literary
recognition. “Why did he look at me so strange?” Capote asks Ford, on the back of
Tchelitchew’s snub. Ford’s gleeful response turns the tables on its questioner: “Perhaps he
thought you look strange. Don’t you like to look strange?” (64). The literary profile of
“strangeness” that Capote cultivated in his early career is wielded against him by Ford as the
justification for Tchelitchew’s social rudeness.
For all that Vidal aligns these two figures in terms of their sexual identity (Ford as a
“fairy,” Capote as an “interior decorator”), they share no sense of alliance across the literary
generations. Ford, like Vidal, sees Capote as a social climber, one who performs an idea of
sexual “strangeness” in order to cultivate more powerful art world contacts. In the perception of
his detractors, Capote would use his social power and effeminate sexual profile in order to
further boost his public author profile for a popular audience. The social performance of his
sexual persona, therefore, faced outwards, in the search for public recognition. By contrast,
Ford’s effeminacy, as seen in the characterization of him as a “fairy” by Vidal, was indicative of
a retrograde artistic sensibility that remained insular in the way it relied upon a code of
communication between people “in the know.” Only within the coterie could Ford flippantly tie
aesthetic judgments to the trivial matter of a pair of good legs. Circumscribed by this cliquish
social space, such judgments could be “enjoyed” by a maturing Vidal, but his eyes were – like
Capote’s, and unlike Ford’s – on the outward-facing prize of popular artistic recognition.
In the next section, I turn to look at how both Vidal and Capote’s public profiles worked
in tandem with their representation of homosexuality in their respective 1948 novels. But for
now, I want to note how, in the interactions he records in his diary, Ford views the social
behavior of both these younger writers with deep cynicism. In part, this is reflective of Ford’s
54
negative perception of his social world, where he and Tchelitchew would bitch about various of
their friends, often saving a particular venom for their female friends. Edith Sitwell is compared
to a “big white worm” (Ford [2001], 18); Nancy Cunard is “like a sewed-up sack,” “a poorly-
paid […] whore”: “how can anyone look that old?” (148). With such vitriol it is little wonder that
Ford cast his eyes around his social circle and sniffed to Lincoln Kirstein that “there is no right
milieu in America” (47). The alienation he felt towards the social community in which he
participated (and the women in this community in particular) was grounded in a generational
insecurity where he felt his artistic practice and sexual persona were read by others as passé. His
encounters with Capote and Vidal catalyze this insecurity, as he recognized that both these
young writers were playing a generation game that would see them soon surpass him and the
coterie aesthetics he represented, primarily through their talent for public recognition. They
achieved this, as I show in my next section, through a depiction of male homosexuality that was
both scandalous and reassuring, for their novels staged a problem of queer maturation that their
sensational, youthful author profiles seem to resolve in their novels’ popular reception.

Capote and Vidal: the literary maturation of the homosexual male

Published in the early months of 1948, Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar and Capote’s novel
Other Voices, Other Rooms both depict young gay men who don’t grow up. But they represent
this failure of maturation in different ways. In The City and the Pillar Vidal viewed himself as
contributing to the postwar literary remodeling of the homosexual male, away from an
identifiably effeminate “fairy” and towards a legibly masculine man who possesses an erotic
55
drive towards other legibly masculine men.
24
Vidal claimed his subject matter was scandalous
for its time: “my description of the love affair between two ‘normal’ all-American boys […]
would challenge every superstition about sex in my native land.”
25
The main character of his
novel, Jim Willard, was a Virginia high school tennis champ, and his friend Bob a
swashbuckling young teen about to go to sea. Together, they represent a physically butch male
homosexuality. Their sole sexual encounter, which takes place when they are both adolescents,
eroticizes the sense of “twinship” they experience in a mutually constitutive masculine sexual
energy.
26
After this encounter, Bob drops out of the narrative, and Vidal describes Jim’s various
sexual escapades across the United States and central America. As he drifts from Hollywood to
Cuernavaca, from military boot camps to literary salons, Jim remains relatively unchanged as
this specific masculine type. Through this fixity, Vidal makes an argument that a homosexual
can be as physically mature as any heterosexual version of masculinity.
But this “romantic ideal of masculinity” of Vidal’s was still “reliant upon a contrast with
the effeminate sexual subject of the fairy.”
27
Vidal viewed the fairy as a figure of abjection: “the
queen world,” he wrote elsewhere, “frightens and depresses me and in its hysteria I see all the
horror of the world brought into focus” (quoted in Kaplan, 330). Vidal saw the effeminate

24
See George B. Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2018), 264–8. An early example of this reading of The City and the Pillar was made by
James Baldwin, in his essay-review of The City and the Pillar and other novels of the nineteen-forties, which was
critical of the rigid gender demarcation between the “masculine” and “feminine” that he saw in Vidal’s novel. See
James Baldwin, “Preservation of Innocence: Studies for the New Morality” in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison
(New York: Library of America, 1998), 594–601.
25
Gore Vidal, “Preface” (1994) in The City and the Pillar: Revised and Unexpurgated (London: Abacus, 1998), 3.
26
Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar (London: John Lehman, 1949), 34. Vidal revised his novel for a second
publication in 1965. While he altered large passages and amended some of the more stigmatizing descriptions of
homosexuality in this second edition, he retained the valorization of masculine homosexuality. For more on the
differences between these first and second editions of the text, see Brenden O’Donnell, “Gore Vidal’s Moral
Program: Homophile Spirituality in The City and the Pillar,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 61, no.1
(Spring 2019): 49–71. Because I am analyzing the period between the late nineteen-forties and the nineteen-fifties, I
discuss the first edition of the novel, published in 1948.
27
David Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 47.
56
homosexual man as a failure of natural development, on an individual and societal level. The gay
subcultures that Jim passes though are populated by these figures, who serve as an expression of
the stagnancy of the queer sexual underworld. Jim “could not find what he wanted here; there
was an overripe, over-civilized aura about his society. Everyone deliberately tried to destroy the
last vestiges of the masculine within himself” (Vidal [1949], 212). Eradicating their masculinity,
these effeminate figures are the unpicked fruits, rotting in their ripeness, a symbol of decadence
and decay. In The City and the Pillar, Vidal locates this developmental failure within New
York’s artistic salons, recalling his personal experiences at parties like Peggy Guggenheim’s
meeting individuals like Charles Henri Ford. Nicholas “Rolly” Rolloson, the host of one of these
fictional parties, is suffused with infantilism in even his physical appearance: “he wore a blazer
with the crest of some excellent school on it; under the blazer he wore a pale yellow shirt of silk;
his breasts jiggled under the shirt as he walked. His hand, Jim noticed, was squashy and damp”
(201). Sweaty palms; jiggling manboobs; a yellow silk shirt: Rolly’s sexual deviancy protrudes
into his corporeal appearance, and is met with Jim’s disdain. Rolly clings onto his youth, wearing
a school blazer for which he is clearly too old, affecting the trappings of his adolescence. Jim’s
response echoes the horror and derision that Vidal felt towards the fairy. As a figure of
masculine normalcy, Jim battles against a degenerate male homosexual culture where the fairy
never grows up.
Yet in spite of his physical maturation, Jim also fails to develop beyond the ideals of his
adolescence. His teenage sexual encounter with Bob, taking place on the wooded banks of the
Potomac River in an old slave cabin, contains a boyhood mythos that teeters into the erotic.
28

28
The critic Leslie Fiedler, writing of the novel in a contemporaneous article on homosexuality and race in Partisan
Review, noted how this pastoral scene placed the novel within a classic American literary lineage that included the
Leatherstocking Tales and Huckleberry Finn. See Leslie Fiedler, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”,
Partisan Review 15, no.6 (June 1948): 669. More recently, George Hutchinson has argued that Vidal’s description
57
Their sex is initiated through a pseudo-innocent wrestling competition, one that leaves Jim with
“a sense of endless time; minutes and hours and years had ceased: only the immediate state was
real” (Vidal [1949], 42). Jim is suspended in time in a way that might seem like a contrast to the
effeminate homosexual he disdains. If the fairy world languishes at the point of historical
obsolescence, then the sexual encounter of Jim and Bob exist within a temporality of the
perpetual present, one where, “as in a dream, their bodies came together and for Jim it was his
first completion, his first discovery of a twin: the half he had been searching for” (42). Vidal sees
this youthful wholeness as the model for a healthy same-sex male desire, where the masculinity
of the gay subject is secured by the reflection he finds through his lover.
However, over the course of the narrative we see how this experience of pure immediacy
ensnares Jim in a state of extended adolescence. “Completed” by Bob in this moment, Jim never
outgrows this ideal of a teenage masculine homosexual desire. Instead, it lives on as an
unattainable sexual fantasy for which he continues to yearn as he ages. This comes to a head at
the end of The City and the Pillar. While Jim has been living across America, seeking out Bob-
equivalents to sustain him while fantasizing about the original, Bob has returned from military
service after World War II, moved back to Virginia, married his old high school girlfriend, and
had a child of his own. Nevertheless, when they arrange to meet in New York Jim has high hopes
that this will be a sexual reunion too. But in a distorted echo of their juvenile wrestling Bob
physically rejects Jim’s advances, and Jim kills Bob in response.
29
This murder, Vidal implies, is
the product of Jim’s inability to grow out of a desire for his sexual adolescent past. “The dream
was shattered, lay white and bruised beneath the cold electric light” (264); enmeshed within the

of the slave cabin in this scene provides a latent examination of the relationship between queer sexuality and black
experiences (Hutchinson, 267).
29
Notably, Vidal changed the ending of The City and the Pillar in the 1965 revised edition. In this version, Jim
rapes Bob but does not kill him.
58
stiffening corpse of Bob is the fantasy of Jim’s youth. Shorn of his “twin,” Jim prowls the New
York docks, consigned to a life stuck on repeat, hunting for any kind of sexual hookup. Forever
cruising dimly lit haunts for fleeting sexual pleasures, Jim is lost to Vidal’s ideal of healthy
masculine homosexuality by the end of the novel because of his inability to grow out of his
adolescent sexual fantasies.
While Vidal’s novel is not about pederasty, he is nevertheless moralizing about the
destabilizing attachment to youth that afflicts the homosexual male (an affliction that he argues is
borne out of the prejudiced and hypocritical sexual attitudes of midcentury America). The failure
of Jim to mature out of his foundational sexual experience, Vidal declares in a later afterword to
the novel, meant he was stuck in a “romantic fallacy”: “from too much looking back, he was
destroyed.”
30
To Vidal, gay men were overly reliant upon desires that flourished in their
adolescence that were impossible to sustain into adulthood. In this dynamic, it is not the adult
who poses a sexual threat to adolescents. Rather, in the age gap that exists between the
adolescent and the man he becomes, the youthful past threatens the stable development of the
adult subject. The gay male subject’s sexual desire does not mature alongside his physical
ageing. Adolescent desires linger on into adult sexuality, malforming both the fairy Rolly,
dressed in his preppy school blazer, and the masculine Jim, who remains devoted to the sexual
experience of his youth even as they passed long ago into memory. Idealized yet pernicious, the
role of adolescence thus grounds the sexual fantasies of the homosexual subject while disrupting
his maturation process into adulthood. This critique was made even as Vidal locates his model
for healthy male homosexuality in the physically beefy appearance of youth, by describing how

30
Gore Vidal, “An Afterword,” in The City and the Pillar: Revised, (London: William Heinemann, 1965), 210.
59
the masculine drives of Jim and Bob, two “normal” American teenagers, leads to a giddy feeling
of reunification within their sexual relations.
Vidal sought to resolve these various tensions with his author profile. A photograph of
him, taken by Jerry Cooke for a different LIFE magazine article (the 1947 one about trailblazing
“young U.S. Writers” who were “ready to tackle almost anything”), shows him, handsome,
clean-cut, collar popped and hair coiffed, sitting in front of a big naval ship.
31
Aged twenty-one,
he looks great, a snapshot of youthful insolence. On the cusp of his own maturity into adulthood,
with a book soon to come out about two gay male characters who both sail the seas, the image
compresses Vidal’s narrative with his own public author profile. This had risks, considering the
homophobia that was amplified in the nineteen-fifties, when the “lavender menace” of
homosexuality was presented as a national security threat, one that had its impact on Vidal’s own
career.
32
But in 1948, with The City and the Pillar a New York Times bestseller, Vidal was
shaping his public association with homosexuality to make an implicit claim about his own status
as a young writer. If his narrative ended with a failed vision of homosexual masculinity, as Jim
remained mired in his sexual adolescence, then Vidal’s author profile offered himself to the
public as his own “completion” of this vision. While Jim has committed murder, Vidal was an
up-and-coming novelist. He was the version of masculine homosexual youth that had not fallen
into the “romantic fallacy” of looking back at his adolescence. Instead, he looked scornfully
ahead, straight into the camera.

31
The full version of this image is included in an inset of Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest.
32
For more on the panic over homosexuals as a national security risk, see David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare:
The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004). Vidal wasn’t seen as a political risk, but during the nineteen-fifties he did experience reputational damage
because of his association with homosexuality. His novels in the immediate period after The City and the Pillar did
not sell well, and he wrote three mystery novels under the pseudonym “Edgar Box” to earn a livelihood.
60
Or, at least, that’s the impression Vidal might have given – if the final spread of the LIFE
article hadn’t cropped his picture to barely a headshot. The writer who took precedence in this
feature, at least in visual terms, had not even published a novel yet. Truman Capote’s portrait, as
Jeff Solomon notes, is almost a full page in size, upstaging Vidal, who “loses most of his
potency” with the reduction of his image (Solomon, 37). In contrast to Vidal and his supersized
(albeit unpictured) naval ship, Capote is surrounded by chintzy objects, giving the impression of
some idiosyncratic, precocious young schoolboy from the fin-de-siècle. It was an impression he
amplified in the author photo for the jacket cover of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Here, Capote
notoriously took the singularity of his visual style to new heights. In this picture, an adolescent-
looking Capote lies draped across a French Provincial sofa, dressed in a childlike tweed
waistcoat. Peeking through is just the hint of a dickie bowtie. His hair is in bangs, and his eyes,
not quite akin to the “bright-eyed” Ford, are wide and piercing, staring directly at his audience.
The response to Capote’s pose, his biographer Gerald Clarke informs us, was a public
scandal; on the release of his debut, Capote became the “most discussed writer in New York’s
literary circles,” because of the uproar caused by his salacious jacket photo.
33
The image, as
Solomon points out, worked in tandem with the character Joel Knox, the queer youth that was
the protagonist of Other Voices, Other Rooms (Solomon, 49). But if Capote was trying to
represent an alternative male homosexual adolescent by way of his novel and his author profile it
revolved around the same idea as Vidal’s, where the maturation of the homosexual is only
fulfilled by the public profile of its author.
However, twelve-year-old Joel is practically the opposite of Vidal’s ideal for the
homosexual youth. Capote defines him by his physical effeminacy: “too pretty, too delicate and

33
Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 161.
61
fair-skinned.”
34
After the death of his mother, Joel goes to stay in a decrepit Southern mansion
called Skully’s Landing, at the apparent request of his previously absent father. However, it soon
transpires that Joel’s dad is a bedridden mute who can only communicate by throwing a rubber
ball against a wall. It is Joel’s “cousin,” the middle-aged Randolph, who has orchestrated Joel’s
arrival. And it is this character who, within the plot’s complex navigation of Joel’s nascent
sexual development, provides the youngster with a model of adult homosexuality. Like Joel,
Randolph is the type of queer man that Vidal would disdain. The homosexuality he represents is
both feminine and immature. He is prone to rambling in long, Wildean monologues and has a
taste for garish bric-à-brac. Randolph thus embodies a range of stigmatizing tropes, ones that
circle around the sexual identity category of the “fairy” that Vidal also identified in his rival
Capote, and from which he was trying to move away.
The stigmatizing trope I am most interested in is the age disparity between Randolph and
Joel. Randolph’s intimacy with Joel – a man in his mid-thirties soliciting the affections of a boy
in the early stages of pubescence – follows something of a grooming pattern, where the older,
more legibly queer subject teases out the non-normative desires latent within his youthful
companion. At times their interactions have a seductive edge: “‘A charming boy, little Joel, dear
Joel,’ he whispered. ‘Try to be happy here, try a little to like me, will you?’” (Capote [1994], 69).
Such exchanges play upon a fretful association between homosexuality and pederasty, where the
influence of aged homosexuals recruit a malleable younger generation into the ranks of sexual
deviancy.
35
But what is so compelling to Joel about Randolph is that, for all the stereotypes he

34
Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms, reprint (New York: Vintage, 1994), 4.
35
The difference between the pederast and the homosexual has historically been collapsed by bad faith actors who
have strategically conflated the two identities, along with the paedophile, to produce homophobic moral panics
throughout the twentieth century. For one famous response to these moral panics, see Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex:
Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011), 137–81. Not without controversy, Rubin offered a defense of “boy lovers” in this essay.
62
represents, he is also a figure of unknowable and inaccessible mystery, a face “composed […] of
nothing but circles” (63). In spite of his excessively childish presence – his bedroom is so
cloying and sweet that it made Joel “feel he had eaten too much candy” (111) – Randolph is a
treacly void, free from subjective interiority. After a mental breakdown near the end of the novel,
Joel wishes to confess his love for Randolph, but is unable to recognize the subject he is
addressing:
Faceted as a fly’s eye, being neither man nor woman, and one whose
every identity cancelled the other, a grab-bag of disguises, who, what,
was Randolph? X, an outline in which with crayon you color in the
character, the ideal hero: whatever his role, it is pitched by you into
existence. Indeed, try to conceive of him alone, unseen, unheard, and he
becomes invisible, he is not to be imagined. (171–2)
In this description, Capote represents Randolph as a subject of radical indeterminacy, whose
competing identities unravel the notion of a stable, complete selfhood. Randolph is suspended in
mid-air, propelled into being by the projections of other people. These projections are marked by
the hand of youth. The “you” that the narrative addresses grasps a “crayon” to “color in”
Randolph’s character, makes a baseball-style “pitch” of the subject into existence. These
childhood activities suggest that the “ideal hero” of the male homosexual is borne out of infantile
fantasies. The “real” Randolph may not be known by Joel, but a version of him is created by this
boyish figure. As an independent subject Randolph is “alone, unseen, unheard,” “not be to be
imagined.” This queer adult is launched into being by the imaginative play of adolescence.
Capote’s novel ends in this spirit of suspension for the homosexual youth. Joel teeters on
the cusp of returning back to Skully’s Landing, beckoned by a mysterious woman who he now
realizes is Randolph dressed in drag: “he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused
only at the garden’s edge where, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and looked
back at the bloomless descending blue, at the boy he had left behind” (187). This final sentence
63
is read by critics as a moment of decision that anticipates Joel’s maturation. To Clarke it shows a
triumphant sexual awakening, where Joel “accepts his destiny, which is to be homosexual”
(Clarke, 152). Solomon agrees that the narrative concludes with “the maturation of a specifically
gay boy into a specifically gay manhood.” (Solomon, 44). Even George Hutchinson, who
misreads this sentence as Joel turning away “to take another path” rather than moving towards
the mansion (Hutchinson, 279), sees it as a decisive act of maturity. But this trajectory towards
adulthood is uncertain. In the liminal space “at the garden’s edge,” Joel relinquishes his boyhood
and … what? Does he step towards or away from Cousin Randolph? Does he become a man or is
he making a transgendered turn towards womanhood?
36
The options are “as faceted as a fly’s
eye,” for we do not see what he becomes; only the “boy” he is leaving behind. This is a parting,
but Joel is left looking back to this former self, the problem that Vidal also ascribed to Jim in The
City and the Pillar. It is Joel’s youthful figure of delicate effeminacy that is depicted, not his
projected adulthood, which remains, like Randolph’s, “not to be imagined.” If this is a “narrative
of maturity” (Solomon, 49), then Joel’s mature identity can only be mediated into a speculative
existence through what he is “leaving behind,” the boy upon whom Capote’s narrative casts one
final, lingering look.
But, like Vidal, Capote offers to the public an alternate ending to his novel’s narrative
through the author profile he performs. “Pitching” himself into public “existence,” the
indeterminacy of Capote’s writerly image means that he does not simply play the queer child,
enacting the role of Joel, as Solomon has suggested. The image of Capote on the book’s jacket
cover also reflects the fundamental indeterminacy of the queer subject, as represented by the

36
For an overdetermined argument on the transgender potentialities of Capote that includes a reading of Other
Voices, Other Rooms, see David Seil, “Truman Capote: Homosexual or Transgendered?”, Gender and
Psychoanalysis 5, no.1 (Winter 2000): 67–80.
64
“unknowable” Cousin Randolph. Capote is, implicitly, the homosexual who seductively
straddles the border between adolescence and adulthood. In his novel, sexual being is shaped by
the mutually informing relationship between queer boy and queer man, whereby the latter’s
existence is shown by Capote to depend upon the former’s imaginative power. In the atmosphere
of suspended knowability with which his novel ends, Capote swoops in for his audience as the
consummation of this queer subject. The irresolution of his representation of adolescence, just
like Vidal’s moralizing diagnosis of the arrested development of the male homosexual, points to
the author’s own literary profile as the successful, public realization of the queer subject. Both
writers produced portraits of same-sex desire where instability and danger arise through an
imaginative over-attachment to adolescence, a process that is at the heart of the disrupted
maturation of the gay subject. But through the publication of their novels, Capote and Vidal
redirect their readers to the palatable face of the queer imagination; namely, themselves, two
young authors working towards maturity by way of a scandalous public recognition in the
postwar public sphere.

Charles Henri Ford: pederasty and artistic adolescence

In their novels, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote stage a troublesome, unstable relationship
between age and homosexuality, where the gay male subject is unable to mature because of the
sexual desires that are crystallized in and through the attractions of youth. They expose what
Kadji Amin calls the slippery “reversibility” of social power within the seemingly fixed
hierarchy of adult-youth sexual relations (Amin, 44). While the respective author profiles of
Vidal and Capote offer a tentative resolution to a postwar literary public, we see a related but
65
unresolved drama playing out in the contemporaneous diary of Charles Henri Ford. If we were to
offer a diagnosis of Ford in terms of these novels, we might well read him as a case study of the
male homosexual’s arrested development. While neither of these novels addresses pederasty as a
primary subject, both describe the inability of the queer adult to grow up. It is an anxiety that
Ford shares in his self-evaluations. Admittedly, his judgment of himself as an “adolescent” is not
about his sexual behavior or desire; rather, it is in terms of his artistic growth that he views
himself as underdeveloped. Nevertheless, in the final part of this chapter, I trace how Ford’s
generational anxiety over his artistic status, one that is set within his disappointing social
experiences of the late nineteen-forties and fifties, is soldered onto the way he formulates his
sexual desires – and, in particular, his pederasty.
In Water from a Bucket Ford expresses a general interest in children and adolescents. He
creates a mystique around the figure of the child: in modern society, he claims, “the child is all”
(Ford [2001], 224).
37
While a queer theorist like Lee Edelman would echo this assessment as a
way to dismiss the heteronormative ideal of reproductive futurism, Ford doesn’t mean this as a
criticism. Instead, he believes people should tap into their inner child: “we are all of us children,
some guided, others misguided” (96). While this isn’t necessarily sexual, Ford is suggesting that
children possess a prelapsarian innocence that makes them receptive to all forms of sexual
desire, outside of the prejudiced framework of modern sexual identity. He describes his own
sexual molestation as a child, recounting episodes such as when he was fondled in a movie-house
as a three-year-old (160), in a remarkably non-traumatized language. His expansive sense of
child sexuality leads to an empathetic understanding of those who have sex with minors. Ford
twice refers to William “Big Bill” Tilden, the Grand Slam-winning tennis player who was

37
The role of the child is also central to Tchelitchew’s paintings, featuring prominently in Hide-and-Seek, as well as
in early surrealist practices.
66
arrested and jailed for soliciting underage males. He describes him with lyrical tenderness: “Big
Bill, hero of a thousand boys, jailed for loving them too young” (193).
38
In this description, Ford
frames pederastic acts with a kind of passivity, as they move to the rhythm of desire, flowing
from the children who admired Tilden to the “too young” adolescents who he was jailed for
soliciting. Ford’s evocation of Tilden recalls the “ideal hero” of Cousin Randolph, colored in by
a child’s projections (Capote [1994], 171). In this comparison, the pederast and the male
homosexual are conceived by Ford and Capote in terms of a childish idealization that also shapes
the direction of each figure’s sexual desires.
These are Ford’s ideas about children, as a source of both creative inspiration and sexual
desire. His own sexual practices, at least as he describes them in his diary, are fleshed out with
more individualized motivations. Ford’s seduction of younger men and adolescents tend to
highlight his own cultural superiority, as he views himself as an introduction to a new way of
life, sexual and otherwise, for his young objects of desire. Ford makes Bert – a former sailor
whom Ford finds especially sexy when he dresses up “like a child” in his naval uniform (Ford
[2001], 23) – his first Old-Fashioned, gives him his first threesome (“first time he’d been sucked
by a woman,” Ford notes [31]), and takes him to literary parties (where Bert mistakes “Truman”
for the President [30]). The role Ford plays is as guide and instructor, initiating Bert into
novelties that range from cocktails to sucked cocks. His sexual attraction to Bert is based upon
the type of masculinity that he presents, one that – like Vidal’s Jim – is virile and unquestioning.
Bert’s appeal is that he is “like a piece of nicely seasoned meat – not tough, not tainted” (24). In
Ford’s diary, the untarnished meatiness of this masculinity is not given access to a subjective
interiority. Without the capacity to differentiate them as individuals, Ford’s youthful lovers blur

38
On Tilden, see Allen M. Hornblum, American Colossus: Big Bill Tilden and the Invention of Modern Tennis
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).
67
into one unified image of primitive masculinity, affixed as the eternal teenage beefcake who
catalyzes Ford’s desires.
Ford’s pursuit of this “animal” type intensifies when he roams the Italian countryside,
after his move to Europe with Tchelitchew in the nineteen-fifties. He finds no youthful sailors
here, replacing this object of desire with a string of adolescent shepherds and goatherds who
charm him with their “unabashed simplicity and uninhibited impulse” (88). The rural livelihood
of these teenagers is the basis upon which Ford makes his assumption about their own primitive
sexuality. In one reverie, Ford fantasizes about catching a shepherd fucking a sheep: “while he is
screwing the sheep I’ll hold its head and when he starts to approach the climax I’ll kiss him!”
(79). Ford outsources the aberrant act of sexually penetrating an animal to the youth. In his
sexual fantasy for adolescent primitivism (one underscored by an Orientalist logic), Ford projects
onto these youths an unbridled horniness that renders them perpetually open to his advances.
39

But in the pastoral pleasures of his Italian seductions, as well as his earlier sexual
encounters with young Americans like Bert, Ford is also claiming a shared identity with these
adolescents based upon his own “animal” nature. It is Tchelitchew who identifies this quality in
Ford – “he insists that I should pull my animal nature ‘up’” (Ford [2001], 143). Tchelitchew
believes that Ford’s own “primitive” identity is mirrored in his desire for the “primitive”
adolescents he seduces, rather than any cultural superiority over his young lovers. Tchelitchew
switches the terms of desire in his reading of his partner, so that Ford’s attraction towards the

39
For the trope of the “beautiful boy” in a long history of Euro-American representations of Orientalist homoerotic
sensuality, see Joseph Allen Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014),
54–67. Eng-Ben Lim joins Boone in analyzing the “white man/native boy’s conceptual, historical, and sexual
couplings,” but does so explicitly from the perspective of the “native boy.” See Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens:
Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 6. Benjamin Kahan also
notes the role of the child within “the fantasy of Eastern despotic (read: unlimited) pleasure” in The Book of Minor
Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 63.
The longer historical association between aged-differentiated “sodomy” and the Middle East is analyzed in Boone,
The Homoerotics of Orientalism, 67–77.
68
youths acts as an affirmation of Ford’s own “primitive” sexual behavior. To the adolescents he
desires, Ford plays the role of gift-giver, instructor, and all-round cultural sophisticate, but he
also possesses a kinship with them through a perception of himself – one fostered by his partner
– as an animalistic, and hence childlike, sexual subject.
This sexual dynamic inflects Ford’s stalled creative activity. Ford’s primitive sexual
behavior is seen as a disruption to Ford’s artistic productivity. This is why Tchelitchew advises
Ford to pull his “animal nature ‘up.’” Ford, however, has a different perspective on this: “I say it
[the ‘animal nature’] has to be satisfied, like an appetite, before I’m left in peace to work” (143).
The trouble for Ford is that his sexual appetite rarely seems “satisfied” for long enough to do any
creative work. We see this in Ford’s wary attitude towards masturbation. He describes this sex
act as “a low form of pleasure – a bare prick staring you in the face, wanting to be stroked like an
animal” (33). Ford associates an animal “lowness” with this act, but it remains a constant
temptation away from the implicitly higher pursuit of writing. Ford finds ingenious ways to use
masturbation as a procrastination method. After getting hot reading some Kinsey, Ford inserts a
lubed-up pencil into his urethra in order to find out whether it really is true that such insertions
produce sexual pleasure. While – with shades of a parent-child interaction – Ford bellows at
Tchelitchew to stay out of his room because he is busy “writing,” he is in fact “fucking myself in
the head of my prick with a pencil!” (36). As a metaphor for Ford’s ability to distract himself
from work by sex, it feels pretty on the nose; Ford’s writing instrument is physically subsumed
by his sexual instrument. This sex act is both a sign of Ford’s creativity (with regards to the
imaginative play of his sexual experimentation) and a channeling of his creative energy away
from writing. As such, it represents the deep but unstable imbrication of Ford’s sexual and
artistic drives.
69
Like all of Ford’s sexual pleasures, onanism isn’t just defined by its “lowness.” It is also
associated with individual and collective forms of identification. The former is a fanciful
extrapolation upon the meaning of “self-love”: “I wish my twin would come along and I’d kiss
him,” Ford declares (62), positioning himself as his own ultimate sexual desire, the “twinship” of
Vidal’s idealized relations taken to its logical extreme.
40
What this means for a collective
identification is that if Ford’s looks are “adolescent,” then the sexual twinship he feels is with
youths in that age bracket. This is the second component to Ford’s masturbatory fantasies. The
sexual desire Ford feels for himself is teamed with an identification with teenage sexuality that is
facilitated by the act of masturbation: “after an excellent lunch of bleeding beef I made my prick
bleed white blood … in honor of all the adolescents jerking off at the same moment all over the
world” (66). The associative quality to this episode means Ford journeys from his lunch of
“bleeding beef,” to the “white blood” of his ejaculation, to a tribute to the adolescents who are
simultaneously the object of his masturbatory desire and performing their own acts of
masturbation. It also signals a return to his meal; after all, the appeal of these adolescents is that,
like Bert, they are “nicely seasoned meat” (24). Jerking off connects Ford to these adolescents,
not simply because such subjects hold a privileged place in his sexual fantasies, but also because,
through this sex act, Ford joins them in a euphoric global participation of onanistic action.
41

In his diary, Ford displays an affiliative form of sexual identity, so that he can claim an
underlying identification with the adolescent figure who is at the nexus of his sexual desires. He

40
Later in his life, Ford took this wish further, when in 1985 he contributed a short written piece titled “Narcissism
as Voyeurism as Narcissism” to an anthology on scopophilia edited by Gerard Malanga. The piece is placed next to
the image that inspired it; a photograph Ford took of himself masturbating in 1934. See Ford, “Narcissism as
Voyeurism as Narcissism” in Scopophilia: The Love of Looking, ed. Gerard Malanga (Toronto: St. James Press,
1985), 46–7.
41
On the figure of the “masturbating child” as one of the foundational “privileged objects of knowledge” about sex
in nineteenth-century Europe, see Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, trans.
Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2016), 231–62.
70
addresses himself as a “little boy,” instructing this internal child to “keep your hands where they
will do most good: grasping pen or pencil, tapping typewriter keys, scratching symbols (words)
instead of scratching your balls (you’d think the cats had been at them)” (75). The fantasy of this
address splits Ford’s identity into an animal-like child scratching at his testicles and an adult poet
whose commitment is to his creative vocation. The push and pull of his sexual fantasies
destabilizes Ford, so that he cultivates an identification with adolescents through his stagnating
position as an artist while attempting to repel them from his desires for the sake of his writing.
Ford’s pederasty conjoins his sexual desire and his artistic status in an uneasy union. The figure
of the adolescent provides a contradictory, fluctuating throughline between Ford’s creative work
and his sexual play.
Ford’s sexual behavior and his artistic status are situated against the generational anxiety
that suffuses the way he experiences his social life over this period. The dislocation that Ford felt
from the literary culture represented by Vidal and Capote – among others – is reflected in the
slippage between desire and identity that Alan Sinfield argues occurs in pederasty, where “the
feeling of the man for the boy may be complicated by a desire-to-be-him” (Sinfield, 131). In
Water from a Bucket, the reader sees how Ford navigates a “desire-to-be” an adolescent through
a fanciful belief that he also occupies this age bracket because of his lack of artistic achievement,
one that is compounded by the sense of inadequate youthfulness he feels in his relationship with
the “famous artist” Tchelitchew (Ford [2001], 117). I am not trying to suggest that this feeling of
generational displacement as an artist acts as an etiological motivation for Ford’s pederasty. But
I am intrigued about how these two fundamental parts of Ford’s identity overlap. While one does
not cause the other, in the case of Ford’s pederasty we can see “the process by which one sexual
formation is interconnected or fused with others,” attached to an artistic identity that “cannot be
71
fully subsumed under the sign of homosexuality or even sexual subjectivity” (Kahan, 113; 111).
In the connection I have made between Ford’s pederasty and his artistic status, I am arguing that
his sexual encounters with teenagers serve as an echo of his artistic underdevelopment.
Proximate to Ford’s sexual pleasure are the feelings of envy, bitterness, and disappointment that
characterize his experience of his subordinate artistic position in the creative communities in
which he socialized.
Ford’s interconnected experience of his sexual desires, artistic status, and social
community is reflective of his position as a coterie artist. I don’t mean this in the way that Breton
did, using the term “pederasty international” as a way to denigrate this type of artist through a
deviant sexual practice. Rather, I mean that for this category of artist, who is defined by the
insularity of their aesthetic practice, the contracted space of the coterie elicits a kind of
definitional pile on, in which connections between social interactions, sexual behavior, and
artistic status are knitted densely together. Analyzing Ford’s pederasty exposes this affective
network because of the way it participates at the fulcrum of a cluster of thoughts and feelings
within his formation as a subject: his inability to garner public recognition through his sexuality;
his alienation from different generations of writers; his fractious coupledom with Tchelitchew,
where he played the parasitic youth. I am arguing that in the realm of the coterie, where social
and aesthetic practice is already conjoined, none of these parts of Ford’s attitudes, behaviors, and
experiences can be disentangled from the others.
One final example taken from Water from a Bucket shows this. In September 1954, at the
age of forty-six, Charles Henri Ford received a payout of $1,000 from the Italian publisher
Bompiani. It was given by the publisher for a “tactless mistake” that led to a photograph of a
youthful Ford, taken by Carl Van Vechten in the nineteen-thirties, being printed as the front
72
cover for a book about juvenile delinquency (Ford [2001], 196). If Ford was sexually eager to
embrace his “twin” (62), then this photograph might be how he imagined him: Ford stares
enigmatically at the camera, young, snappily dressed, the model for a photographer who was, in
Van Vechten, at the forefront of America’s art world.
42
The financial windfall from Bompiani
pleased Ford, who seemed nonplussed by the error. Nevertheless, it is tempting to read the
context of the photograph’s 1954 appearance in light of the generational anxiety Ford felt within
the postwar art world he inhabited. Ford’s “new” life as a juvenile delinquent feeds the narrative
of decline in Ford’s artistic status that I have been relating in this chapter, in which Bompiani’s
error was an inadvertent sign of his arrested development. In 1948, Ford was busy arranging his
position at the center of the Gotham Book Mart image, at the feet of the Sitwells, ruing the
“mistake” through which Vidal had snuck into the picture (19); by 1954, he was himself the
“mistake,” the forgotten youth who was fated to circulate, albeit falsely, as a juvenile delinquent
because his artistic identity, unlike his younger peers Vidal and Capote, had never “matured”
into literary fame and public recognition. His image could stay young “in looks” because he
remained an “adolescent” in terms of his creative achievements (149), and so he consequently
had little power to wield as an artist of high public status. This image, like Ford’s identifications
with adolescents through his sexual practice, sustained the complicated illusion of his
youthfulness. It shows how the echoes of his artistic adolescence and his pederasty could
reverberate in the most trivial, innocuous encounters of his existence.

42
Straddling literary generations up until his death in 1964, Carl Van Vechten was a master of placing himself at the
social center of artistic trends in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. He is particularly
important for his role as a patron to the Harlem Renaissance, as friend and literary executor of Gertrude Stein, and as
an example of queer modernism. For more on Van Vechten, see Edward White, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten
and the Birth of Modern America (New York: FSG, 2014).
73
The reason I choose to focus on Ford’s pederasty in my analysis, placing it at the heart of
my argument, is because it fundamentally spotlights the negativity that defines not only Ford’s
doleful artistic status in this period, but also the treatment of the coterie artist at large. What the
coterie signifies does not bode well for this insular artistic type, in both the creative discourse
that was contemporaneous to Ford and the emotional insecurity that Ford experienced in his
social life of the period. This is a version of negativity that, in different ways, the rest of my
coterie figures will also grapple. Ford’s status as a coterie artist is akin to how pederasty has been
treated within current modernist and queer scholarship; renounced or ignored as a “dusty and sad
relic” of sexuality’s historical past (Amin, 24). Similarly, the coterie is treated as a relic of
modernism, an exclusive social formation that cannot represent the capacious ways in which
modernist communities actually lived. Like Ford himself, the coterie is a forgotten figure of
modernism. But by insisting on the coterie’s existence – even in a state of diminished social and
creative power – and by studying overlooked figures like Ford – even in the light of a
troublesome sexual desire like pederasty – I am arguing that this mere existence is enough for
critical study. In the erotics of age-difference that Ford describes, we remain stuck with a sexual
practice that warrants no justification. But the feelings of dismal negativity that pederasty
engenders for critical practice forecloses any theoretical mollification. It thus reflects my aims
for the wider project of analyzing the experience of the coterie artist as we see it in the rest of the
clique figures I describe. For Ford, at the very least, his sexual behavior stands in an unstable,
but negative, relationship to his creative stagnancy in this period, where he remains attached to
an artistic adolescence that he cannot outgrow.

74
CHAPTER TWO
WRITING FOR GOONY FRIENDS: JANE BOWLES, INTIMATE ATTACHMENTS, AND THE
PROBLEMATIC OF THE POPULAR

Jane Bowles didn’t seem to think too much of Charles Henri Ford’s sex life. In a letter to her
husband Paul, she complained of “those dreadful thick necked people” who get passed from
person to person and finally end up on the arm of Ford.
1
Bowles had known Ford since the late-
nineteen-thirties, when they both romped around New York’s artistic circles, and she clearly
thought he played bottom feeder within the sexual and social hierarchies of America’s
midcentury artistic communities.
2
It was a rare moment of judgment from Bowles; normally, this
writer erred on the side of self-criticism instead. Her letters are racked with recriminations about
her work ethic, her writing abilities, and her social behavior. Pretty much anything she did was
on the table for her disparagement: “I feel like a total failure,” she wrote to Paul, after
experiencing a “revolting” tapeworm (November 1948, Dillon [ed.], 122). More often she felt a
failure because of her limited artistic status. This she blamed on her writer’s block. She had
always been a tortuously slow writer but, as the nineteen-forties rolled into the nineteen-fifties, it
became increasingly debilitating for her writing habits. Even before the severe stroke she
suffered in 1957, which catalyzed a period of ill-health that lasted until her death in 1973, the
stream of Bowles’s publications had reduced to a dribble. A short story, “A Stick of Green
Candy,” was published in Vogue the year of her stroke, but she had finished writing that back in

1
Bowles to Paul Bowles, Late September 1947, in Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, 1935–1970,
ed. Millicent Dillon (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1985), 55.
2
In the courting stages of her relationship with Paul, Bowles had in fact shoplifted a copy of Ford and Parker
Tyler’s novel The Young and Evil (1933), shocking her suitor. See Millicent Dillon, A Little Original Sin: The Life
and Work of Jane Bowles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 55. Unless otherwise stated, biographical
information about Bowles is from Dillon’s biography.
75
1949. Although she continued to plug away at a novel, Out in the World, constantly scrapping
and redrafting it, “A Stick of Green Candy” was the last bit of new work that was published by
Bowles before her death.
Bowles had first been announced to a popular literary audience in 1943, when Alfred A.
Knopf published her novel Two Serious Ladies; sales for her debut were poor amid the fever
pitch of wartime uncertainty. By that point, she was a beloved figure on the social scene of New
York’s art world. Waltzing around Greenwich Village’s bars in the late-nineteen-thirties, Bowles
jokingly referred to herself as “Crippie, the kike dyke” (quoted in Dillon, 120), a nod to her
minoritarian position as a queer Jewish woman with a disability (aged thirteen, she had
contracted tuberculosis of the knee, which left her with a permanent limp).
3
Her marriage to the
composer Paul, a spidery, austere man whom Bowles nicknamed “Gloompot” (Dillon, 82),
helped to solidify her place on this scene. His expansive social connections included figures like
Ford, the composer Virgil Thomson, and Gertrude Stein. Through their relationship, the
Bowleses established themselves as a creative couple who could charm and impress newcomers
in equal measure.
In 1941, Paul’s connections led them to February House, an experiment in creative
community taking place on a residential street in Brooklyn. It was the brainchild of George
Davis, an influential fiction editor who worked for popular magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar
and Mademoiselle. Davis, financially supported by the dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein,
assembled a diverse range of artists to live together in this Brooklyn townhouse, cobbling
together the poet W. H. Auden, composer Benjamin Britten, novelist Richard Wright, burlesque

3
As a point of comparison with Bowles’s own reclamatory embrace of her minoritarian status, Paul Bowles’s father,
with whom he had a deeply antagonistic relationship, is reported to have referred to Jane as “that crippled kike.”
Quoted in Lynne Tillman, “The Life and Death of Jane Bowles (or, Reputation)” in The Bodies That Remain, ed.
Emmy Beber (Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2018), 24.
76
dancer Gypsy Rose Lee, and writer Carson McCullers as his roommates alongside the Bowleses
during the home’s short life span between 1940 and 1942.
4
With such illustrious lodgers, Davis
sought to intertwine aesthetic practice and social cohabitation for an exclusive group of art world
figures.
In February House (so-called because many of its residents had a birthday in that month)
communal living was designed to spark creative collaboration. Bowles performed extracts of her
novel in the living room. Pavel Tchelitchew, a frequent visitor alongside Ford, was inspired to
paint a mural on the parlor wall (one so grotesque that residents implored Davis to cover it).
McCullers penned an article for Vogue entitled “Brooklyn is My Neighborhood,” describing the
local characters she encountered (although she notably neglected to mention the eccentric
characters with whom she lived).
5
While McCullers was turning her attention outwards, to depict
the life of an authentic community living in a “real neighborhood” (McCullers [May 1941], 62),
the main attraction was the clique of artists and bohemians gathered in Davis’s new abode and
the “campy” atmosphere they produced together (quoted in Carr, 126). This group might be
having fun in their co-habitation; but they had more fun knowing that this was an exclusive
arrangement. When her friend Robert “Boo” Faulkner told Bowles that he’d like to move to
February House, she responded dismissively: “you’re not important enough” (quoted in Dillon,
95). Her reply, one that contrasted with her generally hangdog assessment of her own
“importance,” points to this house as an example of coterie aesthetics. Within its collective
creative practice, February House was a heady brew where an exclusive social group invested a
shared artistic value into the carnivalesque rhythm of their bohemian domestic setting.

4
For more on the history of this house and its community, see Sherill Tippins, February House: The Story of W. H.
Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof in
Wartime America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
5
Carson McCullers, “Brooklyn is my Neighborhood,” Vogue 97, no.5 (1 March 1941): 62–3, 138.
77
The Bowleses had to leave February House after Paul had a series of disputes with
Auden about where the composer could play his piano. Everyone loved Jane though. She had a
wonderful ability to generate intimacy between people and was “usually the life of any party she
joined” (Tippins, 162). But this went hand in hand with her perpetual fretfulness, especially
when she considered what this social intimacy meant for her own artistic production. She feared
that her rambunctious social life had a detrimental impact on her work ethic, distracting her from
high productivity levels in a similar way that Ford felt his creativity was disrupted by his pursuit
of teenage boys. But while Ford rarely seemed to turn to the adolescents he seduced for artistic
advice, a primary concern for Bowles was about how she might be excessively influenced by her
peers and their feedback on her writing. Impressionable in so much as she cared deeply about
what others thought of her and her work, she wrote with the judgment of her intimates in mind.
At times, she worried that she was writing for their approval alone.
This dilemma came to a head in the early months of 1954, after the failure of the
Broadway run of her play In the Summer House. For the production, Bowles had returned to the
United States from Tangier, where she lived the majority of the time, having moved there with
Paul in 1948. She had spent nine years writing the play and was determined, after the lukewarm
public interest in Two Serious Ladies, to make this a popular success. But it didn’t turn out that
way. Reviews dismissed In the Summer House as confusing and opaque. There was praise for the
cast – which included the seasoned theatrical stars Mildred Dunnock and Judith Anderson – but
critics weren’t impressed by the play’s minimal plotting and morbid female characters: “amusing
exhibits of one form of neurosis or another,” Brooks Atkinson sniffed in the New York Times, but
“not interesting in themselves” (quoted in Dillon, 232). The Broadway run of In the Summer
House closed after less than four months because of small audience numbers and, in its
78
aftermath, Bowles nursed a familiar set of self-recriminations. In an interview with Vogue she
gave herself a public rebuke: “there’s no point in writing a play for your five hundred goony
friends. You have to reach more people” (quoted in Vogue [1 May 1954], 137).
“Goony” isn’t necessarily the first word I would use to describe Bowles’s social set. The
February House crew, for instance, were a bunch of campy, culturally sophisticated creatives;
“goony,” by contrast, conjures up images of a “person with a heavy touch,” who has a writing
style akin to “the sort of oatmeal served at lunch counters, lumpy and made with insufficient
salt.”
6
The goony type sounds more like the “dreadful thick necked people” that Bowles saw
cavorting with Charles Henri Ford, rather than those in the front row of her highbrow piece of
theater. But, while the term “goony” might sound a bit off, what Bowles was getting at with this
word was that intimacy turned even the most intellectually au courant into a buffoonish
character type. Her friends were thick with devotion for her. This was borne out in their
admiration for In the Summer House. Paul was praiseworthy – as you’d hope he would be –
recalling how he felt “triumphant when I saw how beautifully it played.”
7
Tennessee Williams,
himself the toast of Broadway by 1954, described In the Summer House as “not only the most
original play I have ever read, [but] also the oddest and funniest and one of the most touching”
(quoted in Dillon, 227). Truman Capote, who claimed he was unable to “sit through most plays
once,” said he went to watch this production three times during its brief Broadway run.
8
But
Bowles wasn’t the only one wary of all this support. One of the play’s stars, Mildred Dunnock,
blamed the strength of Bowles’s social ties for In the Summer House’s ultimate failure: “the play
fell apart, probably because people who had adored Jane had not the objectivity to deal with the

6
Frederick L. Allen, “The Goon and his Style,” Harper’s Magazine (December 1921): 121, 122.
7
Paul Bowles, Without Stopping: An Autobiography (London: Peter Owen, 1987), 320.
8
Truman Capote, “Jane Bowles” in A Capote Reader (London: Penguin, 2002), 565.
79
inadequacies of the script” (quoted in Dillon, 233). The intense, personal adoration people felt
for Bowles meant they were unable to detach her from her artwork and critique her play with
“objectivity.” In Dunnock’s reading, the play’s potential to reach a popular audience was
muzzled by the devotion of her goony friends.
I argue in this chapter that the trouble Bowles had with her goony friends is a matter of
coterie aesthetics. I explore Bowles’s response to this coterie aesthetic practice – a response that
she formulates not only in her letters and interviews, but also in her fiction – for two reasons.
The first is to see how the activity of “writing for goony friends” works in relation to the
problematic of the popular. By the problematic of the popular, I refer to the demand midcentury
writers faced to reckon with mass cultural engagement and achieve a commercial success with an
appeal to a popular audience. While I talked about this in my previous chapter, analyzing Bowles
enables us to explore this problematic in other ways. Bowles was in a different situation to
Charles Henri Ford, who felt generationally dislocated within his artistic activity but who had his
main social ties in a self-consciously modernist avant-garde network that was wary of the value
of popular audiences – think of Tchelitchew saying that Hide-and-Seek, his painting at MoMA,
“withdraws its images from the Sunday crowd” (Ford [2001], 16). By contrast, Bowles was a
part of a generation of writers – including her husband Paul, Capote, Gore Vidal, and McCullers
– who knew the value of popular appeal. Along with peers like Capote and McCullers – and
assisted by supportive editors like George Davis – Bowles was published in magazines such as
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Mademoiselle. The platform for popular reach was available to
Bowles in a way that it wasn’t for Ford – she was, after all, able to complain about her goony
friends to Vogue magazine. As a result, she experienced a different sense of failure by her
inability to attain popular success. The problematic of the popular, which was personalized for
80
Bowles by her intimacy with peers who achieved literary fame, was the lens through which she
viewed the inadequacy of her friends’ appreciation. This is the crisis of aesthetic judgment that
she felt throughout her career; that her artistic status was limited by the insularity of her writing’s
appeal, circumscribed by her goony friends.
However, my second aim in this chapter is to show that popularity was no silver bullet
when it came to navigating the personal machinations of aesthetic judgment. Bowles feels bad
about her lack of commercial success and looked on figures like the writer Carson McCullers
with envy. As Bowles yearned for popular recognition, McCullers won acclaim and prizes
throughout her career. Building on the “wunderkind” status she had gained from the runaway
success of her debut, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), she won an O. Henry Prize for one of
her short stories in 1942, and was commemorated by Mademoiselle “for outstanding
achievement by a young person in literature for the year 1947.” That same year Quick magazine
listed her as one of the six best postwar writers in America (Carr, 294–5). But none of these
awards seemed to do her artistic credibility much good. The reception of a writer like Carson
McCullers, an author who’d garnered a mass public appetite for her writing of the nineteen-
forties, shows that literary popularity was just as likely to be considered a sign of weakness as it
was a quality to be lauded. In contrast to Bowles, McCullers had accumulated awards and
acclaim, and had made use of popular women’s magazines to build her reputation. But in spite of
the differences in their popular reception – most starkly apparent in how the Broadway run of
McCullers’s play The Member of the Wedding lasted for five hundred and one performances,
compared to the early closure of In the Summer House – Bowles and McCullers are both
depicted by others as monstrous and freakish. The value of their writing is treated as a negative
offshoot borne out of the excessive qualities of their social behavior. Writing for popularity, of
81
which McCullers is accused by some of her more hostile peers, is deemed just as aberrant as
writing for goony friends.
What does this parallel tell us about the conditions of the coterie within midcentury
aesthetic judgment, as it stood in relation to the problematic of the popular? One thing I consider
in my next section about McCullers is the shared gendering pattern that takes place in the
midcentury construction of both the coterie writer and the popular one. I have previously sought
to show how the coterie – in the remarks of artists and critics as different as Clement Greenberg
and André Breton – was associated with the deviant sexual character of the effeminate
homosexual man. How does this homophobic criticism address the women who were also
deemed “coterie creatures”? The idea of effeminacy as deviant is neutered in the personal
criticisms of Bowles and McCullers. These women – who were married to men but primarily
directed their romantic or sexual energy towards other women – scramble the gendered terms
used to dismiss both the coterie writer and the popular one. Instead, critics focus upon their
abnormal, “excessive” personalities, the transparent ways in which their personalities teeter into
their fiction as their own monstrous version of their characters. The excess of their personalities
and their aberrant social behavior makes them “freaks,” rather than women. Without fully
detaching them from femininity, in critical treatments Bowles and McCullers undergo a de-
gendering process that points to the ways in which literary commentators of the time didn’t
really know what to do with them.
Finally, though, an analysis of In the Summer House means I end my chapter by
exploring a lingering preoccupation of this dissertation. Why, if the trouble with goony friends is
so pernicious, does the coterie artist persist with these ties? What forms of attachment does
Bowles experience, and what forms of attachment does she facilitate in others – not only in her
82
goony friends, but in her detractors too? This is the persistence of the personal, the sticky
devotion to strong ties that Bowles, alongside the other coterie artists in my project, does not
shake off. It is a condition of intimacy that is particularly exposed by a study of Bowles,
McCullers, and their fretful, fateful experiences with goony friends and popular audiences.

Carson McCullers: Harper’s Bazaar writers and monster women

“All hail to Jane Bowles for her happy pronouncement”: the theater critic Walter Kerr was
clearly impressed by Bowles’s interview in Vogue, where she acknowledged the limited
audience appeal of In the Summer House.
9
Bowles had written a “tantalizingly imperfect play”
that “had failed” on Broadway (Kerr, 154), but Kerr applauded her self-flagellation. The critic
spoke for Bowles when he glossed the particular problem that she recognized in her friends: “for
‘goony,’ read: delicately expressive, emotionally reserved, tightly astringent, or fond of the
fleeting nuance” (155). This was a far cry from the “goony” as a stodgy dimwit with a writing
style akin to oatmeal. Friends like Bowles’s were marked out by their suspiciously effete
pretension, a dubious model of effeminate intellectuality composed of character traits like
“delicacy” and “astringence.” The image of the coterie artist protrudes into Kerr’s
characterization of the goony. This figure contrasts with the gendered terms that Kerr uses to
outline what he considers successful Broadway theater. The stage demands playwrights who are
“bald,” “plain,” “clear,” even “a bit vulgar” (155–6); writers who can handle the manly rough
and tumble of the theater. Between the effeminate artist pandering to goony friends and the virile
theater braying for vulgarity, there was only one winner: “the talented man who insists upon his

9
Walter Kerr, Pieces at Eight (London: Max Reinhardt, 1955), 154.
83
right not to say it at all, to hug his meaning like a secret close to his breast, to serve his goony
friends rather than his gaping audience, is better off out of the theater” (156).
Hugging literary meaning close to “his breast,” the implied sexual character of the coterie
artist is structured around the “open secret” of male homosexuality.
10
Kerr’s description of the
“talented man” mingles a critique of this artistic activity – writing for goony friends – with a
distaste for the implied queerness of this social grouping. But Bowles herself gets lost in Kerr’s
article, undergoing a series of gender transformations so Kerr can make his rhetorical point with
maximum forcefulness. While Kerr is following the historical norm that made “he” the standard
subject pronoun even in an article about the work of a woman writer, there is no neutrality in this
pronoun switch. His critical swipe at the “talented man” morphs Bowles into a male playwright
only to then heighten this figure’s transgressive features through an emphasis upon “his”
effeminacy. Bowles’s aberrant artistic practice is performed as an effeminate homosexual man.
But within the parameters established by these pivots across genders, where male effeminacy is
the ultimate marker of artistic failure, what kind of aberration does the female coterie artist
represent when she is labeled “effeminate”? Kerr’s description of Bowles highlights an
illogicality to this stigma that underpins the reviled category of the coterie artist.
Similar issues were being worked through in contemporary critiques of popular writers,
too. In his essay “Adolescence and Maturity in the American Novel” – published a year after
Kerr’s response to In the Summer House – the critic Leslie Fiedler attacked what he called the
“Harper’s Bazaar writer,” which he claimed was one of the two major types of American fiction
writer operating in the nineteen-fifties.
11
Fiedler was unimpressed by this writer type. He

10
For more on the “open secret,” see Sedgwick (1990).
11
Leslie Fiedler, “Adolescence and Maturity in the American Novel” in An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture
and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 201–3. For an analysis of Fiedler’s article in relation to Carson
84
dismissed the mass female readership of magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and
Mademoiselle, depicting them as unable to seriously engage with the fiction published in these
magazines. “Picking it up on the table of a beauty-parlor waiting room,” these women readers
would just mindlessly flick through the magazine’s pages:
Finding a story by, say, Truman Capote tucked away between the picture
of a determinedly unbeautiful model and an ad for a brassiere, most of
the readers of Harper’s Bazaar, one assumes, must simply skip the
meaningless pages; and, knowing this, the editors (writers themselves, or
friends of writers) know that they can print anything they please.
(Fiedler [1955], 201)
12

Just as Kerr’s assessment of the “goony” audience splashes back onto the sexual character of the
playwright, Fiedler blends the femininity of the Harper’s Bazaar reader into the gender status of
the Harper’s Bazaar writer, who becomes effeminate by association. Fiedler claims Capote, who
I argued in chapter one was famous for the legible but non-articulated queerness of his author
profile, as the “most typical” of this writer type (202). Within the pages of Harper’s Bazaar he
appears as one feminine subject among many: diminutive (“tucked away”), he is nestled between
products for women, positioned titillatingly close to intimate female body parts (the bra ad). But
these products were devoid of sexual attraction for a bullishly hetero man like Fiedler who sees
the model for what they are: “unbeautiful.” The critic was also explicit about what this neutered
femininity meant for the sexual character of this grouping: “this new kind of sensibility […] is
quite frankly a homosexual one” (201). He accused Capote of “feminizing Faulkner” by taking

McCullers, see Nancy Bombaci, Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod
Browning, and Carson McCullers (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 110–1.
12
Fiedler’s argument here reminds me of Dwight Macdonald’s more famous complaint about “masscult”
publications such as LIFE magazine, where the contents is a mixture of cultural commentary and light
entertainment, “degrading the serious rather than elevating the frivolous”: “Defenders of our Masscult society […]
see phenomena like Life as inspiriting attempts at popular education – just think, nine pages of Renoirs! But that
roller-skating horse comes along, and the final impression is that both Renoir and the horse were talented.” See
Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult” reprinted in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, ed.
John Summers (New York: NYRB, 2011), 12. Although Macdonald’s essay, published in Partisan Review in 1960,
appears in print after Fiedler’s, a version of these ideas had appeared in article-form as early as 1944, in the first
issue of Politics, under the title “A Theory of Popular Culture.”
85
the content of the latter’s novels and rewriting them in “the true Magnolia Blossom or Southern
Homosexual style” (202).
13

As a figure of male homosexual effeminacy, the Harper’s Bazaar writer – who Fiedler
compared unfavorably with the masculine creative maturity of the “Partisan Review writer” –
was a disturbing parody of an author. Capote, for example, “has come more and more to play at
being an author, to act out for the benefit of his own kind of society the role of the elegant, sad,
futile androgyne – half reigning beauty and half freak” (202–3). The fictional output of these
writers was similarly bifurcated – “a kind of literature at once elegantly delicate and bitterly
grotesque” (201). It was this contrast between their two “halves” – the delicate and the grotesque
– that made these authors entirely deviant. For all the widespread reach they achieved by
appearing in these magazines, the Harper’s Bazaar writer was actually trafficking in perversity
for a select audience. Their artistic “beauty” was all a part of the “play” that the freakish subject
produced “for the benefit of his own kind of society.”
Fiedler tied this insular appeal directly to the popularity of their writing. Because it
appeared in publications designed for a mass readership, the quality of their fiction was
diminished, as Fiedler assumed standards for this female audience were lower based upon the
latter’s limited attention span. A popular audience, to Fiedler, meant an audience who didn’t
know how to read – they skimmed instead – and the Harper’s Bazaar writer saw their aesthetic
value weakened as a result; “anything” could be printed, so long as it pleased the perverse taste
of queer editors like George Davis. This was one part of the problematic of the popular. The
widespread appeal of these authors, circulating among a mass audience, was overshadowed by
the weak level of engagement within this audience. In this way, writing for a popular audience

13
Fiedler’s insult is another example of a hostile critic accusing Capote of being derivative, alongside Vidal’s
accusations that I discussed in the previous chapter.
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was much like writing for goony friends. Ignored by the magazine’s readers, the Harper’s
Bazaar writer could cater to the effeminate sexual character of their “own kind of society,”
cocooned by the insularity of public indifference just as Bowles was by her play’s sole audience
of intimates.
Fiedler claimed Carson McCullers was the “most talented” of this new breed of novelists
(201). His concern was that her characters “stood outside of everything, even their own sex, lost
in a world of freaks” (203). If McCullers’s work was associated with a perversely popular brand
of coterie aesthetics, then Fiedler couldn’t define her freakery by effeminacy alone. This stigma
lacked potency within McCullers’s author profile as a woman writer, so it couldn’t be tarnished
in the way that Fiedler used effeminacy to characterize Capote’s “Magnolia Blossom” style. This
was a denigration predicated upon a gender inversion caused by the male author’s sexual
identity, whereas McCullers’s characters are “outside” of these gendered terms, as well as
“everything” else. In this way, it is not only McCullers’s characters who are “lost in a world of
freaks”; Fiedler’s critique of the coterie artist, as this figure intersected with “women’s”
magazines, also loses its way when he has to grapple with a popular woman artist who disrupts
the homophobic framing of effeminacy that he elsewhere uses to belittle the Harper’s Bazaar
writer.
Fiedler wasn’t the only one to struggle in his critical treatment of McCullers. Various
critics of the period didn’t know what to do with her author profile or her freakish characters.
Without the same ability to dismiss her or her fiction as “effeminate,” people mainly belittled the
excessive force of her personality, which they saw through the lens of her popularity. Critics
focused upon her representation of “freaks” as a way of heightening the characterization of her
as an author in perverse pursuit of popular attention. Consistently in her fiction, from her
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bestselling debut The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) to her critically-panned final novel Clock
Without Hands (1961), McCullers’s characters possess a visual marker of “abnormality” –
whether that was gender androgyny, racial difference, or physical disability – which served as an
allegorical sign of their psychological disaffection from societal norms.
14
But the charge from
critical detractors was that these characters, through their overt signs of freakishness, were over-
sensationalized. Even when Clifton Fadiman, the critic for the New Yorker, praised McCullers’s
debut, he raised the suspicion that she “might be a flop at handling ordinary human beings.”
15

When her next novel Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) continued to focus on deviant
characters (its controversial subject matter was about queer desires on an American military
base), Fadiman decided that freaks were the limit to McCullers’s talent. Her “grotesque and
forced hallucinations” were a gratuitous attempt to generate public scandal, the result of a “too
obvious desire” on the part of the author “to create people and situations that are strange and
startling” (quoted in Evans, 40). McCullers’s use of freaks betrayed a transparent desire for
popular recognition. Whereas Capote, in Fiedler’s critique, was only addressing the effeminate
“society” in which he participated through his appearance in women’s magazines, McCullers’s
ambition for popular success was what rendered her grotesque. Her use of freaks, which
exaggerated their difference from societal norms, was the proof that McCullers’s drive for
literary fame had a malforming effect on her writing abilities, because they were used in service
of attaining popular recognition.

14
For scholarship on McCullers’s treatment of freaks, see Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the
American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 89–111, Melissa Free, “Relegation
and Rebellion: the Queer, the Grotesque, and the Silent in the Fiction of Carson McCullers,” Studies in the Novel 40,
no.4 (Winter 2008): 426–46, Sara Gleeson-White, Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson
McCullers (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), Kristen Renzi, “Dough Girls and Biscuit Boys: the
Queer Potential of the Countercommunal Grotesque Body within Modernist Literature,” Modernism/modernity 22,
no.1 (March 2015): 57–80, and Bombaci, 109–31,
15
Quoted in Oliver Evans, “The Case of Carson McCullers,” The Georgia Review 18, no.1 (Spring 1964): 40.
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It wasn’t just fusty old critics writing for middlebrow publications who thought this.
McCullers’s talents weren’t too highly regarded by her peers. Bowles, for one, said she was “not
really a serious writer” (Letter to Paul Bowles, Early August 1947, Dillon [ed.], 33). This lack of
seriousness was due to the sensationalist and sentimental tendencies in her representation of
abnormal subjects. “Her freaks aren’t real,” Bowles remarked (quoted in Dillon, 209). Millicent
Dillon, Bowles’s biographer, claims that Bowles thought this because McCullers “wrote too
easily about the freaks who were such a feature of her work, thinking to make them attractive by
superficial means,” whereas for Bowles “the more peculiar people were, the more difficult it was
to write about them, the more one had to labor to make them ‘real’” (209). It’s not hard to see the
tacit value judgment laced in Dillon’s explanation of Bowles’s reasoning, which pitted her
biographical subject’s “labor” against McCullers’s “ease.” But you can also see what Bowles
means with this critique. McCullers’s characters always seem to have the power of articulation,
in so much as they can express their alienation from their surroundings while lacking any self-
consciousness that they are doing so. John Henry West, for instance, a six-year-old boy in
McCullers’s novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), vocalizes his wish for a world that is “a
mixture of delicious and freak.”
16
It is a neatly-packaged phrase; one that echoes the tenor of
critiques like Fiedler’s (mirroring the symmetry in his dismissal of Capote as “half reigning
beauty and half freak”) and that, more importantly, establishes a wistful resonance between her
characters’ queer longings and the sentiments of her reader. In his faux-wisdom, John Henry –
who dresses up in women’s clothes to look “like a little old woman dwarf” (McCullers [1946],
360) and scrawls “queer, child drawings on the wall” (259) akin to Tchelitchew’s mural at

16
Carson McCullers, “The Member of the Wedding” in Collected Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 337.
Rachel Adams uses this quote as the chapter heading for her analysis of McCullers’s fiction.
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February House – is himself a delectable figure whose innocence makes abnormality palatable
for mass public consumption.
17

McCullers was a rival of Bowles, and the latter complained to friends because she was
“one year younger than I and has done much more” (quoted in Dillon, 125).
18
So Bowles’s
criticism was – at least partially – a case of professional envy on her part. In facing her, Bowles
was also confronted by the personal face of the problematic of the popular as it compounded her
own sense of writerly inferiority, one that compared negatively to McCullers’s productivity. But
in her gripes over the inauthenticity of McCullers’s freaks, Bowles also believed that there was
something suspiciously easy about how this author produced her fiction and how it was received
by her readership. The result of these “unreal” freaks was a popularity that, Bowles implies, was
the primary aim of McCullers’s creative endeavors. That McCullers had “done much more” than
Bowles was something that made the latter feel bad about herself. But McCullers’s achievements
– which included her ability to churn out narratives about freaks at a relatively high level of
production – also compounded the sense that, to Bowles, she was not really a “serious” writer,
just a popular one.
In a diatribe against McCullers, Gore Vidal suggested that this desire for popularity was
the sole reason she was a writer. He held a real animosity for McCullers – second, perhaps, only
to his intense dislike of Capote – and described her as one of his friend Tennessee Williams’s
collection of “monster women”:
Carson spoke only of her work. Of its greatness. The lugubrious
Southern sing-song voice never stopped: ‘Did ya see muh lovely play?

17
Reportedly, McCullers had modeled her character John Henry West on Capote, who later also inspired the
character Dill in his friend Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960).
18
Bowles’s lament was only partly accurate. McCullers was actually three days older than Bowles, but her rate of
production was undoubtedly higher than her counterpart.
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Did ya lahk muh lovely play? Am I gonna win the Pew-litzuh
prahzz?’
19

While Vidal accepted that McCullers was “talented,” he presents her fixation on external
validation – her imploring plea, her focus on prestigious prizes – as something grotesque, made
more risible through his mimicry of her “sing-song voice.” She becomes a character herself, one
that is strangely disembodied as a voice alone. The drone of her excessive chatter strikes a note
of desperation for Vidal; out of all the writers he knew, he claims McCullers was the one who
cared the most “about the opinion of those condemned to write for newspapers” (Vidal [1976],
n.p.). As a social presence, McCullers has an ego that is so deeply attached to her writing that it
turns the quality of her creative output into one long, wheedling overture for public and private
acclaim. Her disturbing hunger for affirmation is not tied to effeminacy here; rather, everything –
including her gender – is subordinated to her “monstrous” desire for popularity, which Vidal
depicts as a cruel caricature.
Vidal’s dislike for McCullers was highly personal, and heartily reciprocated – McCullers
judged Vidal for possessing the same monstrous egotism of which he accused her. But even the
women’s magazines where she made her name frame her as a grating subject to their readership.
While Vidal complained that McCullers’s distinguishing feature was her desire to win praise and
“prahzzes”, in these magazines it was her career ascent itself that defined her author profile.
Awards had an ossifying function, encasing McCullers as an irksome creative type who – like
any annoying teacher’s pet – would perpetually win the top accolades. This was another part of
the problematic of the popular. It created a feedback loop, where reports on McCullers focus
upon the evidence of her work’s appeal, rather than the writing itself. This gave her success a
static, repetitive feel. In 1951, just after she’d won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award

19
Gore Vidal, “Selected Memories of the Glorious Bird and the Golden Age,” NYRB (5 February 1976), n.p.
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for the theatrical version of The Member of the Wedding, McCullers posed for an article in
Vogue with her close friend (and sometime rival) Tennessee Williams.
20
The photo in the article,
spread over two pages, marked both writers out as a certain queer artistic type. McCullers is all
lapels and cufflinks, mirroring the image of her fellow playwright, as both clutch intently onto
their cigarette holders.
21
Just as suggestive as their outfits was the title of this article, “Incessant
Prize-Winners.” “Incessant” is an unusual word choice, because it associates their prize-winning
capabilities to negative states like “pain” or “nuisance,” in so much as this word often precedes
these terms. The “incessant” aptitude that McCullers and Williams had for hoovering up awards
is framed by the title as an irritating quality, one that is exacerbated by the florid twinship of
their visual image.
In 1951 McCullers was at the height of her literary celebrity. The Vogue article acclaimed
her for this celebrity. “At thirty-four, she has had a brilliant reputation for eleven years, is one of
the few younger American writers known in London or Paris” (Vogue [15 April 1951], 84).
McCullers is justified as worth knowing precisely because she is already known across the globe.
But beyond the triumph of her fashionable “reputation,” McCullers is portrayed as an ambivalent
figure of abnormality: “frail, tall, and pallid, there are moments when Miss McCullers seems
rather like the young girl of Mr. Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie; moments when she has an
extraordinary, precocious maturity” (84). But why is maturity deemed “extraordinary,
precocious” for a thirty-four-year-old woman? These “moments” highlight the predominately
infantile state of her social behavior. But the writer of this article suggests that McCullers’s

20
McCullers was envious of Williams’s theatrical accomplishments. Even after the successful production of The
Member of the Wedding, she wondered aloud to Williams: “now why should A Streetcar Named Desire make over a
million dollars when The Member of the Wedding didn’t make that much?” (quoted in Carr, 434).
21
“Incessant Prize-Winners,” Vogue 117, no.7 (15 April 1951): 84–5. For an analysis of this article’s photo, see
Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (London: Virago, 2021), 114–5.
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childlike periods cannot even be claimed as her own. Instead, she echoes the performance of a
character, one authored by the man in the same feature. The reference to Laura from Williams’s
1944 breakthrough success The Glass Menagerie (a character who was, in turn, based on
Williams’s own sister Rose) suggests a fundamental inauthenticity to McCullers’s own personal
freakery. The comparison strips McCullers – an individual seemingly fixated upon external
validation – of her creative and social agency, transferring the creation of her author profile to
her friend and rival. Even as their outfits match, Vogue indicates a distinction between one “real”
writer and one imitator. An incessant, insatiable prize-winner she may be, but McCullers’s
performance of her fragile femininity rings just as unreal as her fictional freaks did to Bowles.
The slippery nature of the representation of McCullers recalls the queerness of Capote’s
fictional character Cousin Randolph: “faceted as a fly’s eye,” “neither man nor woman,” “a grab-
bag of disguises” (Capote [1994], 171). But whereas Capote’s author profile was designed to
concretize and resolve the queer mystery of his novel’s character, McCullers seems consigned to
remain lost in a world of freaks – both her own characters, and those written by her
contemporaries. What gives her this sense of freakish fictionality is her push towards popularity,
which converts her into an aberrant figure who is belittled by her peers as well as the magazines
that provided her with a platform for popular appeal. My analysis of McCullers has not been an
evaluation of her talent; I have not been judging whether, in fact, her “freaks are real” or not. Nor
has it explored McCullers’s own motivations for her writing, which were less farcical than
Vidal’s monolithic characterization of them. Rather than her fiction or her psyche, I have focused
on the characterization of McCullers, in order to think about what she represented about the
problematic of the popular for a writer like Bowles. McCullers was a disorienting proposition for
peers and critics. And amid her burning desire for popularity, she possessed the trappings of a
93
coterie artist, in the sense that her social behavior affected the ways her work was judged by
others. This is because, as I show in my next section on Bowles, an attachment to the coterie was
not something that writers of this period – whether popular or not –found themselves able to
fully shake off.

Jane Bowles: intimacy’s strong pull

Jane Bowles was also a target for Gore Vidal’s derision; he placed her in the same category of
“monster women” as Carson McCullers.
22
His description of Bowles, though, was less vitriolic.
He claimed that she was “more original” than McCullers; his criticism, if it amounts to one, was
that “she thought and talked a good deal about food and made powerful scenes in restaurants”
(Vidal [1976], n.p.). Such a characterization seems quite benign, especially when compared to
the efforts to which Vidal had gone to make a mockery of McCullers. Bowles’s “monstrosity” is
associated with an esoteric realm of food and restaurants that appears trivial compared to
McCullers’s gargantuan ambition for such external validations as peer approval and critical
acclaim. The prospect of that level of success did not, in Vidal’s description, really register on
Bowles’s radar. Her appetite was instead directed towards more mundane, gastronomic sites of
pleasure. Tennessee Williams recalled a time when he offered her a gift, and she requested a leg
of lamb: “then each day until she used it, she would go to the butcher’s where her lamb was
being stored and say, ‘I would like to see my leg of lamb, please’” (Dillon, 275). Bowles’s
fixations were not set on future aspirations; they were about reassuring herself about what was
already there within her daily existence.

22
Bowles was no fan of Vidal either. She would at times refer to him as “Mr Gorvey” in an effort to annoy her
husband, who was a friend of Vidal’s (Dillon, 200).
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Accounts of her endearing eccentricities position Bowles in light of her obsessions with
seemingly trivial matters; in these terms, her fixations constitute a withdrawal from the concerns
of the literary world (whereas McCullers – Vidal and others suggested – was overly preoccupied
with the worldly concern of popularity). Bowles’s sense of disengagement was something that
also seeped into political matters. She had been a communist between 1938 and 1940, and Henry
Abelove claims that she and Paul “never, in my opinion, wholly transcended or abandoned this
early commitment” to communism (Abelove, 72). But, if that’s true, Bowles certainly seemed
keen to avoid questions of direct political engagement, in her social interactions as much as her
fiction. In his memoir, Paul recalls when “little Mrs. Bowles” was asked at a dinner party for her
“ideas on the world situation”; Bowles excused herself from the table and was later found
napping in another room. “What else could I do?” she asked her husband (Bowles [1987], 271).
And even when Bowles was a communist she took an idiosyncratic approach to political
commitment. Her friend Boo Faulkner – the person Bowles had deemed “not important enough”
for February House – recalled being invited to a Halloween party at the home of the Bowleses in
1940. While Paul was hosting a communist party meeting in the front room, Bowles was hanging
out in the kitchen, “bouncing rubber balls and drinking champagne” with a Georgian princess
(Dillon, 82).
This is how Bowles is represented in the recollections of her peers; as a precious, off-
kilter, indecisive figure who was too eccentric to participate in a world that, in the words of her
friend Williams, “she had correctly surmised to be so inclined to turn wrongly” (quoted in
Dillon, 179). This shared perception of Bowles was inflected by her femininity – “too delicate
for this world” might be the sentimentalized summary of what her peers said about her – but her
perceived abnormality also took her outside of the gender norms of the period. Leo Lerman, a
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friend of hers who worked as an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue over the years, reviewed
Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies upon its publication in 1943. Lerman was praiseworthy, but he
couldn’t resist noting how his friend’s youthfulness (she was twenty-six years old at the time)
distinguished her from other young women: her novel was published at “an age when many other
American girls are busily and painfully engaged in making a protracted transition from the
collegiate to the everyday world.”
23
While Lerman was paying Bowles a compliment, he was
also indicating that she had failed to make that transition to the “everyday world,” and that she
had deviated from the developmental norms of American girlhood as a result. Whether praised or
criticized, Bowles’s status as a coterie artist was determined less by effeminacy, and more by this
detachment from the gender norms of a world into which she found herself unable to
“transition.”
But for all the ways her peers tell us that Bowles was unable to get a handle on this wider
world, we also know that Bowles worried about her artistic status, and that this was based upon
her inability to attract a popular audience. She was envious of Paul’s success, after her composer
husband returned to writing and received immediate popular acclaim upon the publication of his
debut novel, The Sheltering Sky, in 1949.
24
“Your literary success is a fact now, and it is not only
distinguished but widespread,” she wrote to him at the beginning of 1950. She compared her
situation unfavorably to Paul’s. “It would be nice for me to be admired by an established and
talented American writer,” she said after reporting the novelist Eudora Welty’s admiration for
Paul in the same letter, “instead of by my friends and no one else” (To Paul Bowles, 17 January
1950, Dillon [ed.], 147). In this contrast, Bowles concretizes her husband’s achievement: his

23
Leo Lerman, “Three Quite Different Spring Novels,” New York Herald Tribune (25 April 1943), n.p.
24
On Paul Bowles’s attempts to court a popular audience while developing his “cool” literary image, see Brier, 19–
44.
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success is a fact, not an opinion, one that takes shape via the combination of literary prestige
(“distinguished”) and popular appeal (“widespread”). The factual quality to Paul’s success is a
counterweight to the limited appreciation that comes Bowles’s way, from “my friends and no
one else.” The redundant addition of the phrase “and no one else” accentuates the impression of
her goony friends as a leaden chamber in which admiration for Bowles is stuck.
Her limited appeal gave Bowles a sense that her artistic status existed covertly, outside
the official channels of recognition. If Paul’s success is a fact, Bowles’s failure exists only as a
rumor. After the poor commercial reception of Two Serious Ladies, she wrote to Paul that
“Virgil [Thomson] told me that X – a man whom we both know, and who is serious, but I can’t
remember his name – told him that up at Knopf’s they all deny ever having heard of me or
published my book” (To Paul Bowles, Late August 1947, Dillon [ed.], 40). Unlike public
evaluations of her husband, judgments of Bowles circulate through the private channels of her
social milieu, communicated via a gossip chain with mysterious origins. Bowles positions herself
strangely, both as the object of her own gossip and an active participant within it. This chain of
communication moves backwards from Bowles to the composer Virgil Thomson, to an “X” –
who, although unknown, is at least described as “serious,” in contrast to how Bowles appraised
McCullers. The unknown original source, effaced by Bowles’s poor memory, mirrors her own
plight at Alfred A. Knopf, the publishers who deny ever having heard of her. The gossip chain
emanates from an unknown source, but it is really about the process of Bowles becoming
unknowable. Snubbed by the institutions that determine mainstream literary success, Bowles is
not a “fact” like her husband. Instead, she is unknown and unheard, an ethereal whisper
entombed within a network of private gossip.
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Although Bowles felt it shrunk her artistic status to circulate within this contracted
coterie space, she continued to invest deeply in this social world, to the extent that – as we can
see from the previous quote – she uncritically believed the information being communicated
about her own weakened position within her artistic community. She was aware of the limits of
her position as a coterie artist, but she remained attached to the form of intimacy that this social
formation offered. Her comments to Vogue after the 1954 closure of In the Summer House
expresses the bind she felt. As an aesthetic judgment, “writing a play for your five hundred
goony friends” placed the value of her artwork in terms of its reception, which was limited by
both the size and the character of her social milieu. Her assessment that “you have to reach more
people” demonstrated her awareness of the weakness she felt in the appreciation of her audience
of intimates. In order to attract a wider public, Bowles indicated her play needed to be more
active; it had to “reach” people, rather than function as a passive artwork produced for her
exclusive peer network, the goony friends who were predisposed to statically “adore” her.
In this reading, it sounds like Bowles is eager to ditch intimate ties for the sake of her
artistic practice. And yet insularity had its pull. In her statement to Vogue, Bowles displays a
begrudging attachment to her “goony friends,” even as she acknowledged her need to transcend
these ties. While she told Vogue that an audience composed of her peers was not substantial
enough, her yearning to “reach more people” had a different problem, one of weak visualization.
The affectionate personal ties evoked in the phrase “goony friends” was supplanted by a hazy
quantity of “more people.” The world that this wider public constituted remained alien to
Bowles. The value of the popular was clumped together in a blank mass, one that hinted at a
personal loss that Bowles would feel if she were ever to supplant her friends with a “widespread”
audience. The contrasting levels of animation in Bowles’s terms – “goony friends” versus “more
98
people” – shows the instability of her position as a coterie artist. Even as she said the opposite,
Bowles’s use of the term “goony friends” acknowledges that the adoration of her peers was not a
one-way street. She herself recognized the value of intimacy in her artwork’s circulation and
reception. In spite of her proscriptive judgment that she needed to “reach more people,” she
displayed an attachment to her goony friends and the gossip network that made her unknowable
to a world outside of her clique. Bowles was wary about relinquishing her grip on this audience
whose names and faces she personally recognized, and who could offer her personal recognition
in turn.
Bowles twisted herself in knots over the value of her friends for her art practice. She
feared that the Vogue interview had made her seem ungrateful: “I was worried about my
friends,” she wrote, “the real supporters of the play and the contributors to whatever chance it
had […] I was sick at my stomach” (Letter to Natasha von Hoershelman and Katherine Hamill,
June 1954, Dillon [ed.], 174). This visceral mortification was a part of the tortuous uncertainty
Bowles felt about her artistic worth, her social attachments, and the ways these two things tugged
at her, pushing and pulling, as she sought a public place in the world at large. Her friends were
the audience of “real supporters” that Bowles could not envisage in the faceless problematic of
the popular she confronted. And yet, by their limited number, these goony friends could not give
her the “fact” of literary success that Paul had achieved, one that would have given her a solid
foothold as an artist known in the publishing world and beyond. In this entangled mix of artistic
ambitions and social attachments, Bowles found the personal ties to her audience were both a
strength and a weakness of her writing. Where, then, could she locate value in her writing’s
production, circulation, and reception? Was it better to be a coterie artist, writing for an exclusive
audience of intimates, or a popular one, attracting an unimaginable public? And did writing for
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goony friends always necessitate a withdrawal from the world? As I discuss in my next section,
Bowles went some way to dramatizing these questions in the play she had written, the one that
had just failed on Broadway.

In the Summer House: a drama of intimate attachments

“At times Mrs. Bowles laid bare the nerve-ends of her characters, occasionally those of her
audience” (Vogue [1 May 1954], 134). The Vogue article where Bowles discussed her trouble
with goony friends included her in a list of nine playwrights who were “candidates for prizes,” a
projection of future success that distinguished Bowles from the “incessant” prize-winning
happening in the present for her contemporary McCullers. But no prizes came Bowles’s way for
In the Summer House. Her place on Vogue’s list was already undercut by the magazine’s cursory
assessment of the play. Bowles was described in similar terms to her play, overlapping with how
her friends perceived her: “a tense, shy woman, introspective to the point of agony, she has an
equal interest in the agonized probing into the emotions of others” (134). With the frayed nerve-
ends of characters and audience alike, Bowles short-circuited the relationship between artistic
production and reception with her “agonized probing.” In the Summer House incorporates the
play’s audience into the playwright’s own fretful realm, affectively sealed from a world outside
the theater by the forceful, introspective torment of Bowles’s script. In all of her fiction, from
Two Serious Ladies through the small number of short stories that followed to her final,
unfinished novel, Bowles represents the indecision of characters torn between the attachment of
intimate relations and a desire for a recognition beyond these ties. But while the allure of
familiarity is treated suspiciously across her oeuvre, in In the Summer House Bowles reconsiders
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this suspicion. In her play, characters attempt to escape their familiar routine into a new world,
but – as these alien surroundings frazzle her subjects to a point of terror – Bowles highlights the
inability to relinquish these strong familial ties.
Set on the border between California and Mexico, In the Summer House stages the
fractious relationship between two sets of mothers and daughters. These women traverse feelings
of intense hostility and fraught devotion for one another, all the while nursing an attitude of
wearied indifference towards the men who lurk in the corners of their emotional lives. Its central
dramatic action occurs at the end of Act 1, Scene II, when Molly, the listless daughter of
Gertrude Eastman Cuevas, appears to kill Vivian, the excitable daughter of Mrs. Constable.
Vivian falls off a cliff, presumably pushed by Molly because she considers her a rival for the
affections of Gertrude. Vivian’s death – which happens offstage – lingers over the rest of the
plot. Gertrude and Molly participate in a joint wedding, where both mother and daughter marry
men to whom they seem apathetic. While Molly stays in Southern California with her new
husband Lionel, who works at a restaurant called the Lobster Bowl, Gertrude seeks out a new
home in Mexico with Mr. Solares. At the end of the play, Gertrude returns, disenchanted with
her life south of the border, and attempts to blackmail Molly, threatening to expose her role in
the death of Vivian. Gertrude’s aim is to get her daughter to dump Lionel and return back to the
maternal bosom; an unexpected desire, considering the disdain with which she has treated Molly
throughout their interactions. But the play ends with her failure. Molly runs offstage, into the
arms of Lionel, leaving Gertrude alone to reflect upon her own childhood trauma as the curtain
falls.
In the battle between the daughters, Molly and Vivian, we see a clear allegory for the
push and pull Bowles felt between insularity and popularity. Molly – drab, nondescript, reliant
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upon her mother – wants to stay “in the summer house,” disengaged from the outside world.
Vivian, by contrast, is bright-eyed and eager to please, to the point of insincerity. “I’m for
freedom and a full exciting life,” she exclaims, in a desperate bid to impress her new friends.
25

But then Molly pushes her off a cliff. Is this a triumph of the coterie artist over the problematic
of the popular? Possibly, but it doesn’t feel especially celebratory. The “unremitting
triangulation” of the relations that Bowles depicts suggest the tortuous feelings of intimacy that
all of these characters must navigate throughout the play.
26
As Bowles spotlights a stifling,
psychosexual quality that is latent within the play’s family dynamics, she highlights both the
need and the inability of her characters to shift their attachment from the idea of intimate
relations.
Gertrude, who was played by Judith Anderson in the Broadway production of In the
Summer House, is at the center of these triangulated family dynamics. She has bullied Molly
throughout the play but, in the final denouement, claims an intimate knowledge of her daughter
that trumps all other relations: “I know Molly … I know her jealousy … I was her whole world,
the only one she loved … She wanted me all to herself” (Bowles [2012], 368). Gertrude declares
that she composed Molly’s “whole world,” subsuming any subject who exists outside of this
mother-daughter bond. The intimacy between them, the intermeshed claims of knowledge and
possession they make over each other, has no room for anyone else, and the play’s dramatic
action is catalyzed by those characters who disrupt the totalizing nature of their relationship. The

25
Jane Bowles, “In the Summer House” in Everything is Nice: Collected Stories, Sketches and Plays of Jane Bowles
(London: Sort Of Books, 2012), 314.
26
David Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2003), 158. For earlier readings of In the Summer House, see Peter G. Christensen, “Family
Dynamics in Jane Bowles’s In the Summer House,” 49–63 and Charlotte Goodman, “Mommy Dearest: Mothers and
Daughters in Jane Bowles’s In the Summer House and Other Plays by Contemporary Women Writers,” 64–76, in A
Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles, ed. Jennie Skerl (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1997).
102
singular intensity of these relations between women were discussed in pathologizing terms in
critical reviews of the play. Encoded within descriptions of In the Summer House as “abnormal,”
“perverted,” and “degenerate” was a distaste for the sexual deviancy latent in the characters’
intimate relations (quoted in Savran, 156), which functioned as a critique of the heterosexual
logic of America’s Cold War culture.
27
But the “perversion” in these relations also displays
Bowles’s ambivalence towards the social formation of the coterie. In the Summer House is a
drama of intimate attachments where the incestuous, toxic version of family life in the play
bleeds into Bowles’s concerns about the value of her “goony friends” in the audience.
This drama plays out in the humdrum hostilities that underpin the characters’ everyday
interactions. Through these quotidian encounters, Bowles reveals how each character feels their
isolation through the failed comfort they offer one another. Their encounters, bristling with rage
and melancholy, disinterest and disappointment, become fiercely competitive; which character
can dismiss the other person faster, harder, with the most force? While at times their emotions
splatter brutally out into acts of open violence, such as with the death of Vivian, the play’s
negative affects tend to simmer in Bowles’s cryptic dialogue. The sharp edges of innocuous non-
sequiturs are realized in the way characters respond to these utterances. Molly praises the scent
of honeysuckle growing on the titular summer house, complimenting her mother for having
planted it. In response, Gertrude accuses her daughter of knowing that the vine was planted by
the previous homeowners. Molly, Gertrude says, is “mocking me being such a failure in the
garden and not being able to make things grow […] You love to mock me” (Bowles [2012],
302). In this infertile landscape, compliments about “growth” are read as weaponized acts of
recrimination, reminders of “failure,” because growth does not happen to these stagnant

27
For this reading, see Savran, 155–69.
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characters or the stagnant world they inhabit. Bowles’s characters construct the qualitative
experience of their intimate relations out of these coded interactions, where innocent statements
are overdetermined with private, antagonizing meanings.
Bowles’s dialogue is an exchange of trivialities that are weighted with the capacity to
inflict verbal harm, exacerbating the interlocuter’s original grievance. Because of these
wounding words, characters go out of their way to express their hostility towards social
interactions: “I simply hate gossiping with strangers and I don’t want to listen to their business,”
Gertrude says, “I never have and I never will. It disgusts me” (298). But if this visceral recoil is
one Gertrude experiences socializing with strangers, she finds the intimate ties of her family just
as attritional: “even my own flesh and blood saps my vitality – particularly you,” she says to
Molly in the same speech (298). Characters go around trying to avoid their kin. Molly, holed up
in the summer house, hides away from her mother; when Vivian arrives to stay at Gertrude and
Molly’s home, she is aghast to see her own mother there. “Why did you get out of the taxi?” she
berates Mrs. Constable, “You promised at the hotel that you wouldn’t get out if I allowed you to
ride over with me […] You’re dying to spoil the magic” (311). Vivian anticipates the “magic” of
a new environment, but the figure of maternal intimacy continues to protrude into this realm.
Intimate ties are a spoiling technique, from which characters make a failed effort to detach
themselves. In the Summer House articulates the inability to escape to another world that is free
from the vitality-sapping relations that is endemic to intimacy. After the collapse of her marriage,
Gertrude returns from Mexico with a wearily familiar complaint about her life there: “it was
disgusting,” filled with her husband’s “endless visiting relatives, snapping at each other,
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jabbering half the night” (355–6). Stepping out into a foreign country reveals the same tiresome
jabber of an unwanted social life, just in a different familial setting.
28

The possibility of a new life, away from the hostilities of the intimate family dynamic,
withers upon contact with the grinding reality of daily social intercourse. To Bowles, the prosaic
familiarity of conversation is a problem about the barren meaning of spoken words, but this
means any comment can inflict personal harm. From jabbering relatives to screeching macaws,
the white noise of nonsensical language can feel like a pernicious attack. In a realm where every
utterance has the capacity to produce pain, words lose their particular meaning and become
irrelevant: “I like to be with you because you seem to only half hear me,” Lionel says to Molly,
“I think I could say just the opposite and it wouldn’t sound any different to you” (319). Lionel
feels safe knowing that his thoughtful musings do not matter to Molly; that they could mean just
the opposite of what he is actually saying. But after he marries Molly, Lionel has a change of
heart: “I wanted you to listen. I don’t want you to half hear me anymore. I used to like it but…”
(342). Lionel’s claim that he “could say just the opposite” turns out be a prophesy, as he reverses
his original stance. This is the curdling effect of intimacy; what we once liked about a person
becomes their most aggravating habit. People don’t change their behaviors; only our judgments
become harsher as we know someone better. Lionel’s flip-flopping shows that it does not matter
whether he likes or dislikes being “half-heard” by Molly. What is important is that he could say
just the opposite and it wouldn’t affect her minimal engagement with his speech. In intimate ties,

28
The “primitive” role of the Mexican characters in In the Summer House is part of a wider representation by
Bowles of white, Western projections onto a racialized “other,” that can be seen elsewhere in her writing, as well as
in her relationship with the Arabic market stall seller Cherifa. For further analyses of this aspect of Bowles, see
Brian T. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 198–243, and Dina Al-Kassim, On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the
First Order and the Literary Rant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 119–77.
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all utterances are provisional, barely listened to on the surface by characters who are yet
intensely attuned to the personal slights buried deep within them.
It is the withdrawn Molly who appears most damaged by this unsettled realm of intimacy,
where what people say doesn’t matter but conversation is the only thing they share. She is
chastised by Gertrude for her poor skills as a “conversationalist”: “You never express an opinion,
nor do you seem to have an outlook. What on earth is your outlook?” (300). Molly responds
uncertainly, with a vague affirmation for “democracy,” but Gertrude cuts her down to size: “I
don’t think you feel very strongly about that […] It’s very easy to say one is democratic, but that
doesn’t prevent one from being a slob if one is a slob” (300–1). Gertrude claims that her
daughter’s slovenly character makes any political outlook impossible beyond certain “easy”
pronouncements that she does not feel “strongly about.” Lacking firm stances, Molly – like her
author – would probably rather nap than talk politics. Gertrude’s attack contrasts the vagueness
of Molly’s politics with the sharpness of local knowledges within familial relations, where slobs
are recognized as slobs and it is this social character that matters, not any professed desire for
democracy. Bowles shows the imaginative hold that social relations possess over any political
ideas that emerge from a world outside of personal intimacies.
For the slob Molly, this is because she can only weakly visualize what this outside world
would look like. While the strength of Gertrude’s character is reported by people who have never
met her – “I hear she’s got more personality than you,” says one character to Molly (346) –
Molly bobs along listlessly, passive to the rebukes of her mother and indifferent to the advances
of Lionel. When Lionel asks her what she makes of the ocean, she responds “I don’t guess I
emphasize that kind of thing” (318). Undeterred, he pursues another tack and asks her about her
vision for the future, but Molly’s response is the same: “I don’t guess I emphasize that much
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either” (318). Her lack of “emphasis” suggests the weak hold she has on her surroundings, her
inability to carve out a space for herself beyond the immediate, mundane moment. It is only
when she is confronted with a change to her daily routine that she lashes out. Vivian threatens
the structuring dynamic of Molly’s relationship with her mother; she goes over a cliff as a result.
Likewise, after their joint wedding Molly dramatically rejects Gertrude’s imminent departure,
begging her mother to stay. While Gertrude admonishes her – “you’ve been so contented all day,
stuffing yourself right along with the others” – Molly’s response is that she could not “picture”
separating from her mother: “I thought so long as we were here we’d go right on being here. So I
just ate right along with the others like you say” (333). Munching hot dogs on her wedding day,
Molly is consumed by the trivial activities that define her world; she refuses to see beyond them.
Molly is like Bowles, who needs to check up on her leg of lamb daily in order to visualize it. But
she is unlike the characters of McCullers’s fiction, who can conceive of fantastical worlds where
the delicious mingles with the freak. Molly’s dependency on her mother and Lionel exposes the
inadequacy of her world-making powers.
In the Summer House, and the Molly-Gertrude relationship especially, displays the torpid
effect of intimate ties. But, through the inadequacies of intimacy, Bowles shows her characters’
continuing attachment to such close-knit social formations. In spite of the attritional experience
of social interaction, individuals remain jabbering at one another. At the end of the play,
Gertrude, who previously complained Molly sapped her vitality, asserts the primacy of the
mother–daughter bond: “you’re mine, the only one I have … my own blood … the only thing
I’m sure of in the world” (362). The only certainty left for Gertrude is her relationship with
Molly, regardless of how wearisome the latter is. For Gertrude, languishing at the end of the
play, her singular relationship with her daughter is the only “world” that either of them needs.
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The claim of intimate ties asserts itself. “You’re like a wall around Molly,” Lionel says to
Gertrude, as they battle for sole occupancy of Molly’s life. These deeply personal relations act as
a form of enclosure, walling the subject off from the capacity to imagine – let alone escape into –
another world, where they might reach “more people.” However, for Bowles, while intimate ties
function as a kind of death grip, their consolation is that they pull the failed subject closer to a
familiar face, one that offers up the possibility of recognition, as opposed to a wider world of
“opinions” and “outlooks” that remains impersonally out of reach.
The ending of the play stages some of these ambivalences. In this final moment, Molly
fully abandons Gertrude, exchanging their hostile familiarity for the possibility of worldly
engagement with the ambitious Lionel. The curtain falls on Gertrude discussing her relationship
with her own father, turning to intimate ties that predate Molly. Having maintained a fiction
throughout the play that her father “secretly” loved her more than her sister Ellen (who she
describes as “the weak one” [301]), Gertrude turns to examine the unsettling reality of her
childhood. But the play ends as Gertrude begins this story: “[Almost in a whisper, as the curtain
falls] When I was a little girl …” (369). While previous critical readings of the play’s ending,
such as Peter Christensen’s, argue that Gertrude finally confronts a historic family trauma in this
moment, this is actually a last note of uncertainty, with Gertrude hesitantly returning to the past
but uttering only an incomplete fragment before the curtain comes down. Who knows whether it
was a buried truth or a new fiction that Gertrude was constructing in her speech? In the realm of
intimate ties, it is not the content of what is uttered that matters. Rather, what persists is the
lingering attachment to the intimate relations in which characters are left ensnared.
Bowles did not know how to resolve the tension of these attachments. She wrote multiple
endings of In the Summer House, and only chose the one staged on Broadway (which is also the
108
published script), because she was advised that it would guarantee the play’s popular success.
29

In one variation of the ending, Molly is dragged away from Lionel by Gertrude. In another,
Molly leaves the stage and kills herself (Dillon, 227). These alternate endings show both the
earnestness with which Bowles pursued her quest for literary popularity and the uncertainty that
determined this pursuit. Like its characters’ outlooks and sensibilities, the endings contradict and
invalidate each other, exposing the unstable attitudes towards intimate attachments that
characterize Bowles’s own artistic ambitions.
Uncertain about how to end her play, Bowles provides no stable resolution to the
different pulls of familiar intimacies and the yearning to reach alternate worlds. In the Summer
House is a portrait of unsettled states, in which characters’ spoken words become meaningless,
forgotten or ignored, flipped to say the opposite. And yet these words still have the ability to
cause lingering harm. The painful, pseudo-incestuous family dynamics of In the Summer House
mark out a zone of intimacy that functions as an equivalent to Bowles’s experience as a coterie
artist, facing the problematic of the popular. Her longing to “reach more people” is forestalled in
her fiction by an attachment to an intimate life of damaged families and goony friends. Bowles
does not envisage the glimmer of a recuperative model of human relations, where intimacy has
world-making possibilities. In fact, intimacy’s “potential failure to stabilize closeness always
haunts its persistent activity, making the very attachments deemed to buttress ‘a life’ seem in a
state of constant if latent vulnerability.”
30
With In the Summer House, Bowles staged intimate
lives in the wake of this failure, where vulnerability had collapsed into hostile dependency. Her
play thematizes the fraught dynamic between the strong pull of intimate relations and the

29
See Millicent Dillon, “‘The originality and emotional power’ of Jane Bowles,” Library of America (19 January
2017), https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1238-millicent-dillon-the-originality-and-emotional-power-of-jane-
bowles, n.p.
30
Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 282.
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negative feelings of weakness they create. The fluctuating attitude towards the value of social
attachments that we see in Bowles’s experience of her play’s reception is present in In the
Summer House itself. Shadowing Bowles’s renunciation of the intimate ties of her goony friends
was a negative attachment to the buttressing form of this social relation, in spite of an awareness
– from Bowles and from her characters – of the damage it inflicts.

Jane Bowles, Alice Toklas: a pleasure beyond words

Jane Bowles had a sense of inadequacy that was borne out of her status as a coterie artist,
confronted by a demand to attain popular success that she found herself unable to match.
Perhaps, in a different world, Bowles could have been popular – but she probably still would
have been judged negatively by herself and her peers. This, after all, was the fate of McCullers,
who was dismissed with such frequency by critics (including Bowles) precisely because of her
popular appeal, where the fact that she was popular became the proof that she chased after
popularity. In spite of their contrasting fortunes, neither of these writers was able to emerge
unscathed from the realms of midcentury artistic judgment. Instead, they were both accused of
letting their egos dictate their artistic practice, in so much as their writing was reflective of the
dilemmas and ambitions they faced in their careers as they were read from within the intimate
social networks in which they participated. Over their work loomed a negative judgment that
what they produced was too personal. This overspill from their personalities into their creative
practice made Bowles, alongside McCullers, an example of “everything a postwar modernist
would not want to be” (Al-Kassim, 134–5).
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I end this chapter by looking at one final example of how this negative judgment
operated, taken once again from Bowles’s social experiences, to point out some of the ways that
detractors of the coterie artist remained attached to the subject they dismissed. Dina Al-Kassim
has previously explained this episode as a series of intergenerational interactions between two
modernist lesbians (Al-Kassim, 132–44). One was the nervous, twitchy Bowles; the other was
the impervious, aged icon Alice Toklas. They met on Toklas’s home turf in Paris, introduced by
Paul who had, back in the nineteen-thirties, seen himself as a bit of a protégé of Gertrude Stein,
who namechecked him on the final page of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
31
But with
Stein dead and Paul living in Ceylon, it was up to their partners to cobble together a friendship. It
had started promisingly. Toklas was initially enchanted by Bowles, acclaiming Two Serious
Ladies as “the most delightful novel [to] come my way in years and years” and Bowles as “not
surprisingly […] like her novel.”
32
But Bowles soon found herself confronting a familiar sense of
weakness, as she began disappointing this éminence grise of postwar modernist circles. She
blamed herself for the stagnation of their friendship. “I see Alice Toklas now and then, but I’m
afraid that each time I do I am stiffer and more afraid,” she lamented to Paul, “this is not a result
of my shyness alone, but of a definite absence of intellect, or should I say of ideas that can be
expressed, ideas that I am in any way certain about. I have no opinions really” (To Paul Bowles,
17 January 1950, Dillon [ed.], 146). According to this typically self-critical assessment, Bowles
struggled to engage with a world outside of her own private idiosyncrasies; she lacked the
“ideas” and “opinions” that could make her entertaining to Toklas, and consequently failed to
justify her place within an outward-facing intellectual lineage.

31
As I will discuss in my next chapter, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) provides a pre-war example of
a modernist text that attracts a popular audience through Stein’s representation of her private social network.
32
To W. G. and Mildred Rogers, 17 August 1949, in Staying On Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas, ed. Edward
Burns (New York: Liveright, 1973), 177.
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Toklas doesn’t seem to have faced the same crippling self-doubt in her relationship with
Bowles. She cast the younger writer as an undisciplined social subject. The problem with
Bowles, Toklas wrote to Paul, was that she lacked, “any intimate acquaintance with either work
or regularity – can and should one introduce them to each other” (To Paul Bowles, 22 February
1950, Burns [ed.], 189). Criticizing Bowles’s shoddy work ethic, Toklas consigned her to the
domain of her social sphere. Her failure as a writer was a matter of social niceties, where one
merely required the right “introduction” to good working habits.
But Toklas soon went further in her criticisms of Bowles. She censured Bowles’s
excessive behavior and sexual appetite even as she gossiped about these things. After a first
attempt to stage In the Summer House was aborted in 1950, she wrote to her friend Samuel
Steward: “Jane Bowles’s play never came off in New York – someone told me – it may even be
true – that she messed things up by falling in love with the actress who was to be the leading
lady […] She is to her misfortune true to type.”
33
The deviancy of Bowles was not her sexual
object choice per se, but her inability to cordon off her writing from the “mess” of her private
life. The intermingling of sexual desire and artistic practice confirmed Bowles’s social character.
Stuck as her own “type” – to which she was unhappily “true” – Bowles was enclosed as an item
of gossip, circulating as a nugget of information within the whisper network of this literary
circle. But Bowles was a useful foil for Toklas as she gossiped with her pals. It meant that while
Toklas accessed the discursive pleasure of this form of communication, she was also able to
disassociate herself from any emotional investment in this exchange of information. She did this
through the pseudo-skeptical expression “someone told me – it may even be true.” Bowles serves
as a form of social lubrication for a private network of “goony friends” who are able to disavow

33
To Samuel Steward, 22 November 1950, in Dear Sammy: Letters to Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, ed. Samuel
Steward (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 188.
112
their personal engagement in trivial gossip even as they derive a pleasure from it through their
whispered reports of Bowles’s theatrical failure.
Within the private world of her social milieu Bowles circulated as a negative byword for
certain character defects. Her totalizing force as a particular “type” of individual ensured that her
writing only confirmed the weaknesses of her personality. While Toklas did not see In the
Summer House, she still managed to develop a critique of Bowles based on an appraisal of the
play by her friend Mercedes de Acosta, in the aftermath to its Broadway run. Responding to de
Acosta’s letter, she wrote:
[…] what you had to say fascinated and interested me beyond words –
for it was an exact portrait of Jane herself and as I suspected the play
is nothing but a projection of herself – ergo neither she nor the play
are adult […] What in her seemed based on fear – her strongest realist
emotion – you have put your finger on – fear of taking an adult
attitude to her weakness – more particularly even fear of facing adult
responsibilities […] I was relieved for it had worried me a bit – of
course it diminishes one’s interest in her to have the answer.
(24 February 1954, Burns [ed.], 299)
Toklas “answered” the problem of Bowles with de Acosta’s analysis of her play, which offered
an “exact portrait of Jane herself.” Bowles’s personal weakness – what Toklas diagnoses as her
“fear of facing adult responsibilities” – is what consumes her artwork, rendering her play a mere
projection of her fear of maturity. Toklas perceived the theatrical failure of In the Summer House
entirely through the lens of its creator, so that the play provided evidence of Bowles’s failure to
mature as an artist and person. This was the death grip of a coterie aesthetic practice, in which
the artist’s private life tightly envelops their artwork, suffocating any independent life from it
and rendering it a mere communication of the writer’s negative social behaviors.
This is a bit of a grim way to end a chapter about intimate attachments. But Toklas’s
response to Bowles also suggests a thing or two about how we get attached to things, even as we
reject them. In her letter to de Acosta, Toklas had ended her analysis of Bowles with a
113
renunciation: she now knew, she lamented, “why there could be no real pleasure in knowing
Jane” (Burns [ed.], 299). Al-Kassim emphasizes the “staginess of the disavowal” in this letter,
which is apparent in the shift in Toklas’s emotions “from excitation to disinterest through the
spectacle of Jane’s failure” (Al-Kassim, 136). What this performance shows is the ambivalence
within Toklas’s treatment of Bowles. Her letter began by expressing a fascination “beyond
words” for de Acosta’s analysis; Toklas ends by dismissing Bowles to a realm of insubstantial
pleasures. But this is precisely the pull of the coterie artist; that she remains as a trivial pleasure –
however “unreal” or illegitimate – for Toklas to gossip over in spite of the latter’s claim to be
above the fray. Toklas can dismiss Bowles in her gossip, but the strength of her initial expression
of interest in Bowles (“fascinated and interested me beyond words”) lingers on, unspoken, into
the indifference she later claims to feel. Toklas may present Bowles as a cheap confection of an
artist, one who provides “no real pleasure,” but Bowles’s social character remains a delicious
discursive object which mediates Toklas’s own gossipy appetite for what she views negatively:
the messy, the trivial, the weak. This treatment of Bowles demonstrates the strong pull of a
coterie artist. Even as Toklas renounces the “pleasure” Bowles provides, the latter figure persists
as a subject by whom the elder modernist remains “fascinated.”
Al-Kassim suggests this episode reflects poorly on Toklas and the ways she participated
in a wider cultural process of “abjecting Jane” (Al-Kassim, 135). But she doesn’t acknowledge
that Toklas later expressed remorse over the way she treated Bowles. After she’d heard about the
latter’s debilitating stroke in 1957, Toklas wrote: “her inability to work steadily made me
impatient with her – but now I am ashamed and wish I hadnt [sic] been” (To Ned Rorem, 27
November 1958, Burns [ed.], 372). This acknowledgment is not a triumphant victory for Bowles,
nor – I imagine – would she have felt much consolation at Toklas’s admission of “shame.”
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Nevertheless, Bowles’s interactions with Toklas expose the inescapability, even years later, of
the intense emotional attachment that is felt for the stigmatized coterie artist. Toklas might have
summarily dismissed Bowles in her negative evaluation that there was “no real pleasure in
knowing Jane.” But the fascination beyond words for this figure has lived on, congealed now
into the shame she feels about her dismissal of Bowles. The strong attachment of these clique
relations ensure that no judgment can remain settled. This can be seen in how McCullers and
Bowles encountered the complexities of these intimate ties in different ways in the midcentury
period. For McCullers, as she found in her treatment by her peers during the years of her literary
ascent, there was the discovery that popularity would not inoculate her from the judgments of her
peers. And for Bowles, it was in the recognition – often fleeting, largely ambivalent – that she
was always going to be intimately attached to the trouble presented by her goony friends.

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CHAPTER THREE
GRILLING PRIVATE PLEASURES: ALICE TOKLAS, SEXUAL NON-DISCLOSURES, AND
CULINARY COTERIES

If Jane Bowles struggled for things to say to Alice Toklas, it’s a pity if they didn’t hit on food as
a conversational topic. Toklas, certainly, had some detailed yarns on this subject. While Bowles
enjoyed going to the butchers to admire the leg of lamb waiting for her there, Toklas was getting
bowled over by a steamed chicken. The experience stayed fresh in her memory, and she included
it in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), the memoir-cum-recipe collection that Toklas
published the same year as Bowles’s Broadway production of In the Summer House. The
chicken in question was consumed at a restaurant in Lyons, one that Toklas and Gertrude Stein
visited during their days driving for the “American Fund for French Wounded” during World
War I. In Toklas’s narrative, her wartime work still allowed time for gastronomic pleasures. At
La Mère Fillioux’s restaurant the specialty was a whole chicken, “the largest and whitest chicken
I ever saw.”
1
A whole bird was “dedicated to each table, even if there was only one person at it.
Not to have any small economies gave style to the restaurant” (Toklas [2004], 58). We can
picture the restaurant’s stylistic extravagance; a series of tables, each laden with one gigantic
chicken, a domain of endless, perfect poultry, a uniformity that anticipates the work of a Pop
artist like Andy Warhol. But the “style” of the restaurant was not just found in its abundance. It
was also present in the performance of each bird’s dissection:
Mère Fillioux was a short compact woman in a starched enveloping
apron with a short, narrow but formidable knife which she brandished
as she moved from table to table carving each chicken. That was her
pleasure and her privilege which she never relinquished to another.
She was an expert carver. She placed a fork in the chicken once and

1
Alice B. Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, reprint (London: Serif, 2004), 58.
116
for all. Neither she nor the plate moved, the legs and the wings fell,
the two breasts, in less than a matter of minutes, and she was gone.
(58)
The precision of Mère Fillioux with her utensils has the same spectacle as a magic trick, so that a
whole chicken miraculously collapses into the serving portions of its body parts by the force of
one well-aimed prong. Toklas and Stein, presumably, just sat there at the table, admiring the
theatrics of this performance and anticipating the culinary indulgence to come. To Toklas, the
“pleasure” of this steamed chicken was an aesthetic one: of Mère Fillioux, Toklas declares, “she
was an artist” (59).
2

The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook was published at a time when American audiences were
reigniting their interest in international food culture after World War II. Indeed, Toklas’s
cookbook was one of the books that kickstarted a popular taste for French cuisine, one that was
amplified further by the publication of Julia Childs’s bestseller Mastering the Art of French
Cooking in 1961. The popularity of Toklas’s book stemmed from the exotic recipes that she
pulled from both her own life experiences and her friends (most notorious was the artist Brion
Gysin’s recipe for “Haschich Fudge”). But at its broadest level, the argument of the Cookbook is
that cooking should be judged on a similar plane as creative mediums such as painting and
poetry. In episodes like Mère Fillioux’s steamed chicken, Toklas blurs the dividing line between
domestic and artistic creation, constructing a vision of art where the pleasures involved in
culinary production is as important to the aesthetic program as those involved in the consumption
of these edible “artworks.” Stout little Mère Fillioux, with her “formidable knife,” performs her

2
It serves as a contrast to Toklas’s own carving technique, described by one dinner guest as “like a bullfighter
lunging forward for the kill” because of the difficulty she faced reaching across the table to get to the bird, given her
own short stature. Quoted in Linda Simon, The Biography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Doubleday & Company,
1977), 209.
117
artistry on her poor chickens, turning them as white as a blank canvas, and it is this canvas that
then gets consumed.
Scholarship on Toklas’s cookbook rightly frames moments like these in aesthetic terms,
arguing that “the art that animates Toklas’s narration is made in the kitchen.”
3
This is because
the dishes require such technical mastery, and are marked by such excess, that to Toklas they
harbor their own creative form. One example that combines a sensual creative labor with
gastronomic excess is the recipe “Gigot de la Clinique,” which is included in a chapter called
“Dishes for Artists.” While its connection to Toklas’s art world is negligible, its artistry appears
in the act of culinary transformation – a leg of mutton is injected daily with an aromatic
marinade of cognac and orange juice and, by the end of the week, it is “ready to be roasted;
perfumed with the condiments and the spices, completely permeated by the various flavors it has
been transfused into a strange and exquisite venison” (Toklas [2004], 33).The art of this meal is a
sensual practice in which the meat starts as mutton and ends dressed as venison. In recipes like
“Gigot de la Clinique” and Mère Fillioux’s chicken, the dishes display an intoxicating,
intertwined relationship between creator and raw materials, whipped up together in a
“cosmopolitan aesthetic of richness.”
4

Toklas lathered this aesthetic on thick. As the chapter title “Dishes for Artists” suggests,
the artistic credentials of her recipes were not just located in their production; it was also about
who consumed them. In this matter, Toklas positioned her meals within the coterie of artists with
whom she socialized. The recipes show how the social life of this network of creatives was built

3
Shannon Finck, “Alimentary Assurances: Possessive Attachment and Edible Aspirations in The Alice B. Toklas
Cook Book” in Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics and the Avant-Garde, ed. Jessica Martell, Adam
Fajardo, and Philip Keel Geheber (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2019), 136.
4
Sarah Garland, “‘A cook book to be read. What about it?’: Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein and the Language of the
Kitchen,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 7, no.1 (March 2009): 51.
118
out of a shared culinary discernment. In the same chapter as “Gigot de la Clinique,” for instance,
Toklas includes a recipe from the painter Francis Picabia. It is a simple dish of eggs and butter,
but one that possesses “a suave consistency that perhaps only gourmets will appreciate” (Toklas
[2004], 30). Toklas aligns matters of gastronomic and aesthetic judgment; a display of one
implies good taste in the other. This intertwining of artistic and alimentary discernment is
threaded through the social experience of Stein and Toklas, and the world they inhabit. In this
sense, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook functions as a coterie text, for it reveals to the reader how
entry into this exclusive community is predicated on a “suave consistency” that recognizes how
aesthetic value extends from the painter’s studio to the dining table.
This “mingling of fame and food,” Sarah Garland argues, makes the Cookbook
“gossipy,” because of the way it etches a series of private domestic experiences into an art
history narrative (Garland, 35). Toklas recounts the dinner parties that she and Stein attended,
and which painters Toklas cooked for in turn; we learn about Picasso’s diet (lots of spinach, no
red meat), as well as the dishes rustled up by art world names like Pierre Balmain, Natalie
Barney, and Carl Van Vechten. These personal revelations are a part of Toklas’s own taste for
gossip, which she saw as adjacent to the culinary. “Oh Sammy,” she responded to one delectable
tidbit from her friend Samuel Steward, “this is the sort of thing I eat with a spoon” (quoted in
Steward, 45). In this offhand exclamation of delight, Toklas brings the pleasures of gossip into
the same realm of consumption as the meals that provide her with such satisfaction.
But for all the pleasure that she derives from gossip, it is also striking that the Cookbook,
even as it spotlights the social life of Toklas’s artistic coterie, actually divulges very little about
the private intimacies of her friendship network. The text discloses little more salacious than
their dietary habits. This coyness is, at least in part, due to what the narrative leaves unstated
119
about Toklas and Stein’s own relationship. Stein is just “there” in Toklas’s life, a continual,
dominant presence, and this means Toklas can avoid having to explicitly articulate their
relationship as a lesbian one. Freed from the representation of sexual desire, the pleasures of the
text are outsourced to the food. How Toklas negotiates (and struggles to negotiate) these
pleasures – sexual, aesthetic, gastronomic – in her text is the focus of this chapter.
This is not an attempt to “out” the Cookbook. I agree with Katherina Vester that to call
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook a “closeted text,” is based on the troubling assumption “that a
same-sex relationship needs to be marked as such,” which ignores the inhospitable conditions
towards queer visibility in the midcentury period.
5
Nevertheless, I believe that the text’s reticent
approach to the representation of the primary sexual relationship in the narrative should also be
understood in the context of Toklas’s wish to gloss over her relationship with Stein as she
curated her partner’s posthumous legacy in the nineteen-fifties. In the aftermath to Stein’s death
in 1946, Toklas worked to maintain the public profile of her dead partner, while seeking to
minimize her own place in Stein’s legend. There was a fundamental tension in her ambition “to
act as guardian and promoter of Stein’s reputation while keeping herself in the background and
the specifically lesbian inflection of their relationship a secret.”
6
Toklas did this by warding off
eager Stein biographers from making what she called “private judgments” about Stein’s
sexuality, seeking to guide them back to Stein’s writing (Letter to Julian Sawyer, 12 June 1947,
Burns [ed.], 69). But, as I will show in this chapter, the “private” was also a shifting, unstable
entity within the personal remembrances of Toklas’s own writing and, in particular, her
Cookbook. In this context, what she meant by “private judgments” was itself uncertain, even as

5
Katharina Vester, A Taste of Power: Food and American Identities (Oakland: University of California Press,
2015), 165.
6
Anna Linzie, The True Story of Alice B. Toklas (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 146.
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she believed in rigidly policing the space of sexual desire as a private matter that was not
involved in artistic practice – as we saw in her judgment of Bowles in my last chapter.
A focus on the meaning of the “private” in Toklas’s usage fleshes out a central
component of the indeterminate status of the midcentury coterie artist. For Toklas, the “private”
– at least in the term’s sexual meaning – was something that should not interact with the public
act of artistic creation, nor the semi-public act of culinary creation. How did she reconcile this
with her status as a coterie artist, exposing the private activities of her social life? Whereas my
previous analyses of Ford and Bowles have tended to focus on the ways in which the private
concerns of these individuals – consciously or not – spilled over into their artistic practice, with
Toklas we have someone desperately trying to avoid this seepage, intent on preserving privacy
even as she is explicitly writing about her coterie with the intention of its immediate publication
(the first writer to do this, out of the subjects I primarily analyze in my chapters). This wish to
maintain privacy raises a different set of questions about the experience of being a coterie artist
in this period, and what it means for the construction of an aesthetic practice as it intersects with
Toklas’s non-disclosure of her sexuality.
Exploring Toklas’s slippery understanding of the “private” not only affects our
understanding of the Cookbook’s representation of her relationship with Stein (in particular) and
her social life (in general). It also illuminates how Toklas represents her creative culinary
practice. We can see this in the alignment Toklas makes between her steamed chicken and her
conception of art. The representation of Mère Fillioux’s carving is suggestive because of the
steps Toklas skips in her narration. Re-reading this episode, we might question the plausibility of
a one-pronged carving technique, in which a single jab with a fork can result in the complete
dissection of the bird sitting on the table. In this moment the artistry of the performance is
121
exaggerated, eliding certain steps of the domestic labor. Even as she brings artistic production
into the space of the kitchen, Toklas keeps stages of the culinary process “private” in her
retelling. In Toklas’s aesthetics, a claim to artistry is based upon not merely the artwork’s
reception, nor the critical discernment that the artist displays, but also the maintenance of a
private space in her narrative where certain pleasurable acts are kept hidden from public
disclosure.
This veiling of parts of the production in this culinary experience serves as a corollary to
the position of sex in the representation of Stein and Toklas’s relationship. Its presence is there
even as Toklas avoids talking about the sexual nature of their relationship. The artistry of
cooking and the social relations of artists each becomes, like the representation of Stein and
Toklas’s relationship, a question of veiling the grunt work that leads to the finished product. But
by picking away at Toklas’s narrative, to expose the glimmers of sexual desire we see within
Toklas’s realm of the “private,” we get to look at something I’ve tended to overlook in the
gloomy disposition of my previous chapters: the pleasures of the coterie. Even though my
subject is an ageing, grieving “widow,” who for the final twenty-one years of her life is in a state
of extended bereavement, when it comes to an analysis of the coterie this is my happy chapter.
7

In Toklas’s personal theory of art, so expansive that it can encompass Stein’s poetry, Picasso’s
paintings, and Mère Fillioux’s chicken, we can recognize the coterie as a site of private
pleasures, even as Toklas seeks to shift the focus away from sexual matters in her narrative.
Toklas is important not only in her own right as a coterie artist. She also provides a
bridge to the coterie aesthetics of two of America’s most prominent twentieth-century artists.

7
Her partner’s death soon after World War II left Toklas adrift: “without Baby there is no direction,” she wrote in a
letter, referring to Stein by one of her pet names, “it’s just milling around in the dark” (To Fania Marinoff, 21
February 1948, Burns [ed.], 103).
122
One of these is Stein, someone who Toklas knew on the most intimate of terms. Up until her own
death in 1967, Toklas directed her energies towards curating Stein’s legacy, in what Melanie
Micir describes as a “late archival mode of artistic production.”
8
She coordinated the publication
of the entirety of Stein’s manuscripts through Yale University Press with their friend Carl Van
Vechten and arranged the donation of Stein’s unpublished materials to this university’s archives.
She also maintained the hosting duties for which she and Stein had become famous, opening her
door to Stein enthusiasts who made the literary pilgrimage to postwar Paris. Toklas’s written
work of this period – most prominently the Cookbook, published in 1954, and her memoir What
is Remembered (1963) – form a part of this wider mode of artistic production.
9
In this chapter I
read The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook in light of Toklas’s aim to bolster the artistic reputation of
her dead partner. I do this by analyzing the relationship between Toklas’s Cookbook and Stein’s
own aesthetic practice, as this was manifested in the latter’s most renowned popular success, The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Stein’s own memoir, famously written in the voice of
her partner, draws attention to the social happenings and private domesticity of this relationship.
I explore how Toklas’s cookbook works as both an extension and possible disruption of these
themes.
But Toklas wasn’t the only figure in America’s art world who had a cookbook out in the
nineteen-fifties. Andy Warhol also published one. Created with his friend Suzie Frankfurt (and
his mother, Julia Warhola, who provided the calligraphy), Wild Raspberries was borne out of
very different personal ambitions from Toklas’s. At the time, Warhol was a successful

8
Melanie Micir, The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2019), 86.
9
In this chapter, I do not consider Toklas’s second cookbook, Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present, which was
published in 1958. The book was co-authored with the writer and editor Poppy Cannon. Toklas felt Cannon took
over the book, and she later disavowed the publication (see Simon, 235–6).
123
commercial artist who was on the cusp of, but had not yet entered, the prestigious realm of fine
art. His nineteen-fifties artworks diverge stylistically from the Pop Art that was soon to make
him famous. Wild Raspberries (a reference to the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries
[1957]) was indicative of this style – a campy, self-consciously hand-drawn series of
illustrations, created through the blotted line technique, that were paired with recipes written by
Frankfurt that had titles like “Omelet Greta Garbo” and “Roast Igyuana Andulusian.”
10
Rather
than aiming for the popular audience that Toklas’s cookbook attracted, Warhol’s book was
designed to circulate among a select audience of his peers and intimates, as he navigated the
“fifties fairyland” of Manhattan’s creative scene.
11
And yet, in spite of these differences, I want
to compare these cookbooks in order to put pressure on the competing visions of art that Toklas
and Warhol lay out in their texts. This is not the same kind of competitiveness that Ford felt
towards Vidal and Capote, or that Bowles felt with McCullers. Warhol didn’t cause Toklas
anguish – indeed, it’s unclear if she even knew of him. In the contrast between Toklas and
Warhol, then, we don’t have the experience of exclusion that marks the coterie artist in my
previous chapters, where the failure of one figure is thrown into relief by a more successful
artistic career. Here, rather, I am trying to show the parallels and the differences within the social
character of two versions of the coterie artist – Stein and Toklas’s, and Warhol’s – that, across
the generations, achieved popular creative recognition. We will get to the ways these two
aesthetic sensibilities diverge in their envisioning of the “private” later in this chapter. In my next
section, I turn to Stein and Warhol in order to lay out the overlapping character of these two
great practitioners of artistic sociability in twentieth-century American art.

10
Andy Warhol and Suzie Frankfurt, Wild Raspberries, reprint (New York: Little, Brown, 1997), n.p.
11
Quoted in Blake Gopnik, Warhol: A Life as Art (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 116. Unless otherwise stated,
biographical information about Warhol is from Gopnik’s biography.
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Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol: shoes and gossip

In 1955 Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas received an unexpected sequel. It
was namechecked in another collaboration by that fledgling artist Andy Warhol. The poet Ralph
Pomeroy (called “le faux Truman” for his resemblance to Capote’s jacket photo on Other Voices,
Other Rooms) provided the words and Warhol drew a series of shoe illustrations, collected under
the title à la Recherche du Shoe Perdu.
12
The clunky insertion of “shoe,” which displaced temps
from the title of Proust’s epic novel, was the book’s sole punchline, a camp joke that extended
throughout the text. Warhol’s drawings, produced through the blotted line technique that was his
signature style of the nineteen-fifties, were each accompanied by a title that replaced a word in a
recognizable quotation with the word “shoe.” Alfred Hitchcock’s latest film “Dial M for
Murder” became “Dial M for shoe.” Shakespeare’s most famous line turned into “To shoe or not
to shoe.” A commanding wartime imperative was revamped as “Uncle Sam wants Shoe.” And
nestled in amongst the frivolity, paired with an illustration of a bright pink, high-heeled shoe
with a large red bow and a wispy dotted pattern, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas received a
similar treatment, transformed into “The autobiography of alice B. shoe.”
13

12
This claim about Pomeroy comes from Edward Field, who writes that “actually, Ralph looked more like the photo
than the real-life Truman Capote did. He was the idealized version.” Edward Field, The Man Who Would Marry
Susan Sontag: And Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2005), 31.
13
For this image, and others included in the book, see Andy Warhol, Shoes, Shoes, Shoes (New York: Bulfinch
Press, 1997), n.p.
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Figure 1: Andy Warhol, “The autobiography of alice B. shoe.” in Shoes, Shoes, Shoes, n.p.

À la Recherche du Shoe Perdu was an extension of what Warhol was most known for in
his commercial work. By 1955 he had developed a “reputation as the man to go to for pictures of
footwear” (Gopnik, 86), which culminated in the New York Times marketing campaign for the I.
Miller shoe company (Warhol used the Shoe Perdu drawings as part of his pitch for this
commission). As his commercial career took off, Warhol cultivated his intimate social network
through less public-facing artworks. In the nineteen-fifties he began privately printing books of
his illustrations, limited to 200 copies, that he would gift to friends, benefactors, and those he
wished to pull into his social orbit. Warhol would go so far as to inscribe each copy with a low
number from the print run, in order to heighten the sense of exclusivity felt by the gift’s
recipient.
14
Works like à la Recherche du Shoe Perdu, as well as the later Wild Raspberries,

14
Jesse Kornbluth, Pre-Pop Warhol (New York: Panache Press, 1988), 152.
126
carved out a foothold for Warhol within the art world’s social landscape, one that was based on a
claim of intimate personal ties – you received the gift because Warhol knew you and,
presumably, wanted to know you better. This social intimacy was also a part of the book’s
production. These nineteen-fifties works were genuinely collaborative affairs, ones that involved
co-authors, Warhol’s mother who hand-wrote the titles, the printer Seymour Berlin, and the
“striking young men” who attended Warhol’s “coloring parties,” where the artist would enlist his
guests to color in the outlines of his blotted line drawings (Kornbluth, 152). The way that Warhol
embedded his social networking within the process of his creative production is what “casts him
as a coterie artist” in this period.
15

Warhol’s status as a coterie artist connected him to the writer to whom he made reference
in one of his shoe drawings. Stein’s representation of an art world’s social life had made The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas her most popular work. She had written the book “in a kind of
paroxysm of desire for the fame and money that had so far eluded her.”
16
And her self-
proclaimed “moneymaking style” had its intended effect (quoted in Steward, 26). Sales of her
book took her into the realm of literary celebrity, which led to a well-publicized speaking tour in
the United States in 1934 that further boosted her public author profile.
17
The popularity of her
book was, at least in part, due to her willingness to put her social milieu on display. Through a
cast of ever-revolving characters, Stein created a “narrative of cosmopolitan sociability” that put
her own artistic genius at the center of modernism’s orbit.
18
With her repeated use of the proper

15
Lucy Mulroney, “One Blue Pussy,” Criticism 56, no.3 (Summer 2014): 573.
16
Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 8.
17
There has been extensive critical work on Stein’s relationship to fame in the aftermath of The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas. See, for instance, chapters in Solomon, 83–137 and Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and
the Problem of Genius (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 133–59, among others.
18
Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010),
89.
127
names of famous artists she appeared “the focus of a coterie of luminaries.”
19
As this central
focus she directs the flow of the book’s gossip, at the same time revealing the pleasure she
extracts from exchanges of intimate knowledge: “Gertrude Stein enjoyed all these complications
immensely. Matisse was a good gossip and so was she and at this time they delighted in telling
tales to each other.”
20
Here, the relationship between Stein and Matisse (one that broke down
after the publication of the Autobiography, when Matisse took issue with Stein’s description of
his wife as “like a horse” [Stein, 41]) is based upon the “delight” they bring each other through
their talent as “good gossips.” It is the basis for the majority of Stein’s judgments in the
Autobiography. While she assesses the artistic qualities of her peers in her book, the social
performance of these famous figures is a central part of Stein’s evaluation of her coterie.
Stein’s love of gossip, an appetite that was matched by Toklas, was also shared with
Warhol. He claims gossip was “an obsession of mine.”
21
Warhol’s “the autobiography of alice B.
shoe” highlights the connection between these artists through “their mutual love of tittle-tattle,”
and nods to the wider influence of Warhol’s artistic predecessor on his creative practice.
22

Edward Powers explains this parallel in a detailed analysis of “the autobiography of alice B.
shoe.” In this reading, the florid pink shoe paired with the title was accentuated Toklas’s
Edwardian-era, ultra-feminine fashion, making Warhol’s illustration “the style of shoe that

19
Lynn Z. Bloom, “Gertrude Is Alice Is Everybody: Innovation and Point of View In Gertrude Stein’s
Autobiographies,” Twentieth Century Literature 24, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 84.
20
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, reprint (London: Penguin, 2001), 75.
21
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 73.
22
Edward D. Powers, “For your immediate attention: Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol, and Henry Geldzahler,” Word
& Image 30, no. 4 (October – December 2014): 416. More broadly, Gerard Malanga has listed Stein as a major
influenced on Warhol, alongside “Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, television, and the movies.” Quoted in John
Wilcock, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, ed. Christopher Trela, reprint (New York: Trela Media,
2010), 116. Other scholars who discuss the artistic relationship between Stein and Warhol include Will, 160–5.
Phyllis Rose argues that Warhol’s writing shares a literary sensibility with Stein and other American writers like
Walt Whitman in “Literary Warhol,” Yale Review 79, no.1 (Autumn 1989): 21–33. Alongside Powers, Reva Wolf
briefly notes Stein’s influence on Warhol based upon their mutual interest in gossip. In 1980, Warhol included an
image of Stein in his series “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century,” an image that both Powers and Will
analyze.
128
would have been fashionable around 1907 when she and Stein met” (Powers, 416). The
illustration holds a particular relevancy to the origin story of Stein and Toklas’s relationship
because it situates the image within the timeframe of their first encounter. It thus holds a whiff of
gossip that gestures to the sexual reality of this famous couple. When read in this light, the
illustration also perpetuates gossip about Warhol and Pomeroy. The references to queer writers
like Stein and Proust “announce […] Warhol as a fellow traveler.”
23
Out of the oblique hints in
these titles, the text weaves a tapestry of art world gossip that includes the book’s writer and
illustrator as well as the subjects they mentioned. Shoe Perdu projects an intimate glimpse into
the sexual identity of an imagined, intergenerational creative community, whispering
suggestively to its art world reader a specific sexual knowledge about the private life of its
creators.
However, there are limits to this interpretation. This portrait of sexual disclosure is
complicated when we return to the Stein book that Warhol and Pomeroy evoked in Shoe Perdu.
For all the gossipy energy of the Autobiography, its indiscretions are, like Toklas’s cookbook
that followed, fairly tepid. Stein’s memoir reveals little specific about the subjects it names.
Instead, through the repeated circulation of these proper names, these subjects lose their
individual significance. The reader is left with the impression of a coterie art world where the
whirl of its social life renders its participants interchangeable. “Who else came. There were so
many,” writes Stein, in the voice of Toklas: “It was an endless variety. And everybody came and
no one made any difference” (Stein, 135).
24
Devoid of individual personality, the names float
around in what Mark Goble describes as “a strange wasteland of publicity, […] a void of privacy

23
Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol: A Biography (New York: Open Road, 2001), 49.
24
This interchangeability is also performed through the narratorial voice, as Stein’s text presents a faux
collaboration with Toklas, ventriloquizing her as the speaker of her “autobiography.” What, we could ask, is Stein
suggesting about the individual subject of Toklas, that it can be mimicked so cohesively?
129
and interiority” (Goble, 100). Stein’s text challenges the idea that forms of intimate
communication such as gossip reveal intimacies about the private life of an individual, because
the characterization of the famous names she references extends to little beyond the surface of
their names. The feedback loop of the Autobiography’s gossip chain “captures a network of total
publicity that is both intimate and empty, a circuit that finally closes around nothing at all”
(Goble, 124). Nevertheless, Stein makes it clear she derives pleasure from this gossip, however
empty, because she locates its pleasure in the general form of the revelation, not the particular
content of each revelation. Stein and Matisse extract delight in the process of “telling tales to
each other,” not from the individual “complications” themselves. Her text valorizes a form of
intimate social exchange that yet does not disclose any specifics to the reader about the “void” of
Stein’s private life.
Reading “the autobiography of alice B. shoe” in the context of the Autobiography,
therefore, shows how the illustration does not work as simply a particular reference to the
sexuality of Stein and Toklas. Once we situate “the autobiography of alice B. shoe” next to the
other shoe illustrations in the text, Powers’s claim is less compelling. After all, the titles in Shoe
Perdu are hardly limited to gossipy modernist books; rather, highbrow gestures commingle with
references to popular cultural products and folksy maxims. Given this, why should one
illustration and its title from Shoe Perdu be singled out for particular significance in explaining
the text’s vision of “queer sociality”? The illustration of “the autobiography of alice B. shoe” is
colored pink and of a traditionally feminine design, but there are plenty of other pink shoes with
antiquated designs and ornate features that appear in the book, seemingly untethered from the
meaning of their individual title. For all their distinctive features, the correlation between each
individual shoe’s style and its respective title is not readily legible; a title might just as easily be
130
attached to one illustration as another. It echoes Stein’s description of her social life, where
“everybody came and no one made any difference” (Stein, 135). What “the autobiography of
alice B. shoe” highlights, when looked at alongside the other drawings in Shoe Perdu, is the
interchangeable and contingent relationship between illustration and title, one that reflects the
empty exchange of gossip taking place in Stein’s milieu in the Autobiography.
25

An endless variety, where no one makes a difference. Such a description can also apply
to the aesthetic practice of Warhol at large. It is a description that encompasses the famous
repetitions of Warhol’s Pop paintings, such as the 32 flavors of his Campbell’s Soup Can
paintings that he exhibited in 1962, as well as his blotted line drawings of the nineteen-fifties.
Likewise, Stein’s popular work of coterie aesthetics detaches proper names from the
representation of individual personalities; it is the formal impression of gossip that circulates in
the text, not the content of private divulgences. Warhol and Pomeroy’s work reflects this
severance in the dissonance they create between title and illustration. By placing these two
coterie texts next to each other, we can also read Shoe Perdu as a commentary on Warhol’s
social network, even if the text does not overtly reference his friends like Stein’s Autobiography.
Through the arbitrary relationship between title and illustration, Warhol’s text glosses his
experiences networking within the art world community. With the detachment of meaning from
title and illustration, the role that an individual performs within this community is also split off
from the personal interiority of the individual subject. A shoe might have one title, but it could
just as easily have another; similarly, individuals will cycle in and out of this art scene, but they

25
Lucy Mulroney makes a similar point about another of Warhol’s illustrated books from the nineteen-fifties, 25
Cats name Sam and one Blue Pussy, and connects this to his commercial work. These texts resonate with “that
commonplace vehicle for hawking mass-produced goods: the product catalog,” offering “a spectrum of slight
variations on the same product from which a potential customer may choose” (Mulroney, 561–3). While the place of
the commercial in Warhol’s artistic career, as well as in the creative culture of the nineteen-fifties more broadly, is
bound up within the social hierarchies he was navigating in important ways, my focus here is on how these texts
reflect his wider stance on the social relations of his artistic community.
131
do not significantly inhabit the role they perform. The names may change, but there will always
be some influential powerbroker, waiting to be courted by one of Warhol’s gifts.
26

This social dynamic, one I identify in the work of both Stein and Warhol, also appears in
Alice Toklas’s Cookbook. In her depiction of their social life, Toklas often sounds like Stein
(who is, after all, ventriloquizing Toklas) in the Autobiography: “we commenced madly running
about, to see our friends and theirs,” Toklas writes, “our home was filled with people coming and
going” (Toklas [2004], 72). Toklas’s anecdotal descriptions of their toings and froings echoes the
“endless variety” described in Stein’s earlier book, where “everybody came and no one made a
difference” (Stein, 135). The two narratives converge in their depiction of a shared social life
that exists as a whirl of activity, a blur of guests and hosts who cycle in and out of their
respective narratives. Punctuated by meals, the Cookbook primarily describes the pair bouncing
from dinner party to dinner party, while occasionally playing host themselves in the domestic
comfort of their famous abode. In this way, the Cookbook mirrors the Autobiography as a coterie
text. Even as chapters are used to demarcate defined periods in their life together – their home in
Paris, their summers in Bilignin, their experience of two World Wars – these individual chapters
each participate in the same rhythm of names dropped and houses visited.
Anna Linzie claims Toklas’s representation of her social life constitutes one of the
Cookbook’s “renegade” qualities: “in scattering famous names around her, representing them not
through high discourse but instead through anecdotes, reminiscences, fragments, and recipes,
Toklas drops the regime of the proper name and claims for herself the right to name and unname

26
The attitude of social cynicism that I am positing about Warhol is not new. It is a central tenet of the public profile
of Warhol that has been disseminated over the years. The charge against Warhol that the aesthetic is severed from
the personal is a part of the theoretical narrative that views him as emblematic of the “waning of affect in
postmodern culture” that distinguishes it from high modernism. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 10–1.
132
her own world otherwise” (Linzie, 172). But this act of mixing, in which – through her name-
dropping – Toklas whisks together a high modernist artistic culture with an informal domestic
space of recipes, does not possess an inherently subversive edge. It is also an act of conservation,
maintaining the attitude that Stein held towards her social life. The intermingling of names and
recipes has a similar effect to that of Stein’s treatment of her art world friends in the
Autobiography, or the relationship between title and illustration in Warhol’s Shoe Perdu, where a
proliferation of named signifiers betrays a lack of relational depth to what (or who) they signify.
This is most apparent in the Cookbook’s longest chapter, “Recipes from Friends,” which offers
the reader a list of recipes that Toklas has collected from her social circle.
27
The general
impression drawn from this culinary social network overwhelms the particular relationship
between individual recipe and named subject, rendering the latter arbitrary. Why does it matter
that Natalie Barney’s recipe is “Stuffed Eggplant with Sugar,” and Mary Oliver’s one is “Larks à
la Conchita Hernandez”? It is the mass of names checked by Toklas that lingers. As a coterie
text, the Cookbook offers a social space akin to a potluck dinner, in which everyone comes
bearing a dish, but no single guest makes a difference. Like the Autobiography, Toklas’s
Cookbook is a representation that creates the impression of intimacy, without the divulgence of
private interiority. Rather, the taste of the intimate life, like any good meal, is ingested and
internalized, not to be shared with a public audience. There is no delectable gossip to consume
here about the named subjects; instead, we are left with the names of dishes offered by these
celebrated individuals. For all the appearance of gossipy revelation, the texts of Stein, Toklas,
and a young Warhol do not disclose any deep intimacies. Out of this gossip network of subjects,

27
There was a practical justification for this chapter – Toklas had a deadline to hit for her publisher, and she needed
to pad out the word count. She explains the situation to a friend who provided a recipe, where she claims that the
“Recipes from Friends” chapter will be “the only thing of merit in the deadly dull offering” (Letter to Louise Taylor,
14 March 1953, Burns [ed.], 274–5).
133
shoes, and meals, names remain just names, fancy shoes are not expressive of personal
individuality, and recipes give away no secrets. The interior self is shielded from gossip’s
revelations. It is the sexual, one particular strand of this private, interior self, that I turn to
explore in my next section.

Warhol, Stein, and Toklas: determining private matters

Stein and Warhol’s coterie texts were borne out of different contexts, with different ambitions in
mind. In 1934 Stein’s reputation was secure among her milieu, whereas Warhol’s intention in the
nineteen-fifties was to establish himself within a network of peers. At this point in his career, he
was not concerned by the popular appeal of these texts. He had a mass audience through his
commercial work, but this did not provide him with cultural clout in the art world he was seeking
to inhabit. It was Stein who was reaching for popularity with the Autobiography. But for all the
differences between these particular coterie texts, Warhol and Stein share an affinity in how they
envision the private within their coterie aesthetic practice. This similarity becomes more
apparent over the course of Warhol’s career, in the representation of his social circle in films
such as Chelsea Girls (1966). In these films, as in Stein’s Autobiography, intimate relations
appear in Warhol’s representation of his social circle, but they are divorced from the “depth” of
an interior subjectivity. The confidences shared by his cast of characters get lost in the repetitious
nature of the text. His earlier works of the nineteen-fifties also display this attitude to his social
life. The gossipy tones of Warhol’s texts, like Stein’s popular work that came before him, create
the impression of a private realm ready to be disclosed, but this sensibility vacates significance
from each potential confession, diminishing the potency of each specific revelation. Similar to
134
what we saw in Jane Bowles’s In the Summer House, the representation of these social relations
– no matter how confessional they appear – instead operates as the background fuzz of white
noise.
This social character feeds into how Warhol and Stein represent sexuality in both their
work and their artistic profiles. But what form the sexual takes has been contested in scholarship
about these two queer figures. Kenneth Silver argues that in Warhol’s artistic practice, the idea
that sexual meaning is something that can simply be uncovered lurking “behind” his artworks
fails to account for Warhol’s “insistence that we remain on the surface of things.”
28
This
insistence on the surface, Silver argues, encompasses the sexual, so that it evades the fate of the
closet that the construction of artistic “depth” implies (a “closeted” depth that Silver associates
with Abstract Expressionist painters, and Jasper Johns in particular). The surface appearance of
sexuality is present not only in Warhol artworks that are sexually explicit – films like Blow Job
(1964) or Blue Movie (1969) – but is also present in his Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, where
Silver argues “there is no place to go ‘into’ the work, no depths to plumb, no mysteries to
unravel” (198). Such a surface treatment recognizes that sex is everywhere, “infused […] into
every sigh,” so that “nongenital indulgences – gossiping, painting, photographing, dictating […]
– emit their own rude erotic charge” (Koestenbaum, 13). Gossip, in Koestenbaum’s reading, is
sexual in the very surface experience of the act; no more needs to be disclosed in its details.
Recognizing Warhol’s sexuality on the surface of his texts reflects the artist’s dismantlement of
the private. The public and the private, “if hardly identical, were a pair of interconnecting
chambers” (Silver, 194). If there is nothing to read “into” one of Warhol’s artworks, be it shoe,

28
Kenneth E. Silver, “Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art” in Hand
Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–1962, ed. Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1993), 179–203.
135
soup can, or something more overtly sexual, then that is because there is no private space where
sexual meaning resides that isn’t already available on the surface of the artwork.
Efforts to assert the sexuality of Warhol have often sought to challenge the framing of
him as disinterested in or incapable of sexual desire: “Andy is often called asexual as a way to
avoid calling him queer” (Koestenbaum, 11).
29
However, while the work of reclaiming Warhol
as a queer figure is an important one, it is also crucial to recognize how Warhol’s pose of
asexuality also existed on the surface of his texts. The libidinal charge of his artworks are met
with the cool detachment of his own creative profile. Warhol’s surface sexuality encompasses his
“strategic embrace of frigidity” and his “sexualized celibacy.”
30
In this sexual presentation of
abstention there is an unresolved tension between the de-personalized representation of sexual
relations (as well as social relations) that Warhol displays, which can be read as “asexual,”
“frigid,” or “celibate,” and an acknowledgement of the overt, queer desire that circulates in his
artworks (and his own “swish” behavior, which was at its “extreme” in the nineteen-fifties
[Warhol and Hackett, 13]). Warhol’s friend Charles Henri Ford – the subject of my first chapter
– articulates this tension when he recalled how “everything is sexual to Andy without the sex act
actually taking place” (quoted in Wilcock, 57).
31
Sex acts do occur – at times in his artworks and
at times in his personal sexual activities – but they collide with his cool, affectless artist profile.
Within this collision, did the surface of his artworks really implode the private realm, or did it

29
In the 1990s, scholarly efforts to recognize how sexuality operates in Warhol’s work and profile pushed back
against critical attempts to “de-gay Warhol.” See Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz,
“Introduction” in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1996), 3.
30
Michael Moon, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy
Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 112, and Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies: American Modernism
and Sexual Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 127.
31
Ford befriended Warhol in 1962, and became an enthusiastic champion of the artist, offering him a social entry
point into New York’s art world.
136
just establish new parameters for the binary between private and public, in and “out,” in the
sexual life of this artist?
Such uncertainties are also part of scholarly discussions of Stein’s sexuality, too.
Catherine Stimpson charged the Autobiography with propagating a “lesbian lie,” one that
implicitly denied the presence of homosexual relationships, even as its narrative gave one of
these relationships a starring role.
32
This veiling was bound up in Stein’s representation of the
private, where the text’s “decorum construes all sexuality as private and then begs private things
to stay private” (Stimpson, 153). Stein certainly believed in the delineation between private
sexual matters and public artistic practice. While she claimed, in conversation with Samuel
Steward, that homosexuals “do all the good things in all the arts,” she made clear that she did not
attach this triumph to their sexual behavior: “I like all people who produce and Alice does too
and what they do in bed is their own business, and what we do is not theirs” (quoted in Steward,
56). Sexuality, including her own, is severed from the value of “production” and kept in the
privacy of the bedroom. But Stein undercuts this division in her next statement to Steward: “We
saw a part of all this in you but there was a dark corner and we were puzzled and now we have
the right answer, haven’t we” (56). Stein can’t help but shine a light on Steward’s sexuality, and
– like Toklas resolving the problem of Bowles – she is only satisfied now that she has “the right
answer.” Steward’s “dark corner” is clearly not so sacrosanct a space that it can avoid Stein’s
prying; not all privacies are created equal, it seems. While Stein may claim that what other artists
“do in bed is their own business,” this principle is held less dear to her than her main point: that
what Stein and Toklas do in bed is not the concern of other people. Stein can butt into the sexual
behavior of others, but her own activities remain off limits.

32
Catherine R. Stimpson “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie” in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of
Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 152–66.
137
While Stein cordons off her bedroom from public scrutiny, others have suggested that
this boundary was actually quite permeable for a reader of the Autobiography. Even a critical
reader like Stimpson notes that although the book’s portrait of Stein and Toklas is “as tasteful as
a middle-class Baedeker,” the Autobiography “leaves a paper trail about homosexual realities”
(Stimpson, 159). It is this paper trail that other scholars have traced, arguing that Stein and
Toklas “made their private lesbian relationship a matter for public consumption.”
33
It is made
public by the sheer narrative presence of their relationship. A purloined letter, the Autobiography
“hides its protagonists’ sexuality in plain sight by making it visible to those that know how to
look.”
34
For the public at large, this meant knowing how to overlook. The text produces an image
of “respectable queerness” (Solomon, 126) that enables Stein’s lesbian relationship to be ignored
by the public precisely because it wasn’t kept private. The Autobiography retains what Stimpson
calls its “decorum” because, in the unmarked queerness of the lesbian couple, who simply exist
within the narrative of the text, it is shorn from any hint of explicit desire, even “for those that
know how to look.” Like Warhol’s artworks, the presence of sexual difference might appear on
the surface of the Autobiography, but it does not impute sexual desire upon its creator because
Stein offers no vision of depth in her representation of her private life with Toklas. The result is
two artists, Stein and Warhol, who carve out an unstated, public version of queerness in which
the libidinal energy that exists in their texts functions adjacently to their artistic profiles.
When it comes to Stein, the sexual detachment she cultivates leaves Toklas in a tricky
spot as the latter began to manage her partner’s posthumous literary reputation. Toklas sought to

33
Alice T. Friedman, “Queer Old Things: Image, myth, and memory in 20
th
-century Paris,” Places Journal
(February 2015), https://placesjournal.org/article/queer-old-things/, n.p. For a wider claim that lesbians remain
overlooked in narratives of modernism, see Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians (London: Head of
Zeus, 2020).
34
Chris Coffman, Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 141.
138
maintain the “respectability” of Stein’s reputation, and she did so through the image of her prim
literary persona that had been publicly crystallized in the Autobiography. But her efforts to foster
this public respectability after Stein’s death was complicated because Toklas was, after all, the
most evident part of the “paper trail” that served as public proof of Stein’s homosexuality. Yet in
the public structure of their relationship she was also synonymous with what was kept “private.”
In the coupledom of Stein and Toklas, Hannah Roche argues, the “private” is what operates as
“the outside thing,” away from the public realm: “in the private, internal space of their home,
disconnected from convention and from the need to cultivate Stein’s public persona, the couple
could express a desire that essentially, to others, would remain disguised and indecipherable.”
35

In Roche’s description there is a clear sense of surface and depth, with Toklas operating as the
signifier of what took place within the interior world of the private, domestic space. Toklas was
both “the outside thing,” the subject who operated externally from Stein’s creative position, and
the public representative of Stein’s internal private life – one that remained “disguised and
indecipherable” to the public. This indeterminacy is exacerbated when Toklas was left to dictate
the terms of their relationship to a postwar public in the wake of Stein’s death.
Some of Toklas’s friends felt she overegged her own diminishment. “The self-effacement
which Alice is supposed to have cultivated,” Donald Sutherland recalled, “and indeed was
carried so far that her very existence was debated in the press, became a form of publicity in
itself, and if she did subordinate herself to Gertrude, in public at least, she was not at all the sort
willingly to disappear.”
36
Nevertheless, Toklas expended considerable energy cultivating this
position of public subordinacy, one that culminated in her memoir What is Remembered (1963).

35
Hannah Roche, The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019),
67.
36
Donald Sutherland, “Alice and Gertrude and Others,” Prairie Schooner 45, no. 4 (Winter 1971–72): 288.
139
Published towards the end of her life, the memoir perpetuated a narrative of “disappearance” in
the eyes of most reviewers. Toklas was accused of being totally subsumed by Stein in the
retelling of her own existence. “Did she never wish for a life of her own,” asked The Saturday
Review, “for anything of her own?”, whereas Time magazine described it as “the sad, slight book
of a woman who all her life has looked in a mirror and seen somebody else” (both quoted in
Simon, 247). What is Remembered constituted a sacrifice of her own selfhood for the sake of a
world of “celebrated friends and Gertrude Stein in many poses” (quoted, 247). This was the
effect Toklas sought in her published writing; to show Stein in many poses, all of which
obscured Toklas.
But in Sutherland’s cynical interpretation of Toklas’s intransigence, we see how she was
perceived to be unwilling to fly completely under the radar, even as she claimed to do just that.
This might account for some of the hostility with which she has been treated in literary histories
over the years. At one extreme, there was Ernest Hemingway’s depiction of her relationship with
Stein in his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast (1964). In it he characterized Toklas as a
privately dominant figure known as “pussy,” to whom Stein would plead and beg.
37
But there are
plenty of other lukewarm responses to Toklas in the memoirs of her peers. “Posterity has not
been kind to Stein’s alter ego” Janet Malcolm notes (Malcolm, 223), but that didn’t stop
Malcolm herself from emphasizing Toklas’s “canine characteristics”: “she tended Stein’s literary
and personal legend with the devotion of the dog at the master’s grave. She would snarl if
anyone came too close to the monument” (138). Whether cat or canine, Toklas irks friends, foes,
and biographers alike through the contradictory role she performs as custodian of Stein’s legacy.
She is the figure of Stein’s private life that irritatingly protrudes into public consciousness

37
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: Sketches of the Author’s Life in Paris in the Twenties (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 118.
140
through her efforts to sustain the “lesbian lie” of Stein’s narrative, one that her very presence
simultaneously threatens to expose.
If Toklas had been able to bury her status as Stein’s sexual partner in her own written
work, she had more difficulty handling the admirers who were clamoring to write Stein’s
biography. Toklas found it impertinent that people were sniffing around Stein’s private life. As
they strayed into the realm of Stein’s personal relations, these biographers often failed to meet
Toklas’s exacting standards. One of them, Virginia Sprigge, was judged of doubtful literary
acumen – “she can write but can she read,” Toklas pondered (Letter to Annette Rosenshine, 2
February 1955, Burns [ed.], 314) – and was later decried for the “vulgarities and insinuations” of
her “hateful manuscript” (Letter to Isabel Wilder, 8 April 1956, Burns [ed.], 337). John Malcolm
Brinnin was dismissed as an “upstart crow” (Steward, 233), disliked by Toklas for his off-putting
“romanticism” of Stein: “I did not hold it in his favor that he was visibly moved to be in Baby’s
home” (Letter to Carl Van Vechten, 27 September 1950, Burns [ed.], 204). Brinnin’s
sentimentality encroached upon the private space of Stein’s home, one that Toklas received
assurances would not be the focus of his biography: “I got him to exclude me from his book
because the atmosphere of Baby’s home was a private matter” (205). Her battles with
biographers and critics to keep her out of public sight is cloaked by the ambiguous word choice
of “atmosphere,” which suggests a nebulous private space into which intrusive biographers may
not trespass, at least in public.
Brinnin promised Toklas that he would exclude her from the narrative, but he ended up
devoting parts of his biography to her significance anyway.
38
It was a transgression committed
by other writers too, each of whom failed to accommodate Toklas’s self-effacing demands. W.

38
John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and her World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960),
101–17.
141
G. Rogers, a friend of both Stein and Toklas’s, caused her much consternation with the
publication of his 1948 memoir about Stein, When This You See Remember Me. Rogers’s
foreword acknowledged Toklas’s disgruntlement with his manuscript: she “severely charged me
with devoting too much space to her. This is not about Miss Toklas, she argued, and Miss Toklas
must be kept in her place. I am sure Miss Toklas has been kept in her place; to write about Miss
Stein without Miss Toklas would be comparable to writing about Pollux without Castor.”
39

While Toklas wanted to keep herself hidden, Rogers insisted that there was no way to divide the
public-facing Stein and her private corollary. By intertwining the two figures through a classical
allusion to twin half-brothers, Rogers expresses the difficulty facing midcentury biographers
writing about Stein. How far were they willing to go against Toklas’s wishes? Could they write
about Stein’s domestic life without exposing her bedroom antics to public scrutiny? There was
no ready answer to this problem, beyond Toklas’s wish for silence. Transforming Stein and
Toklas into male relatives from Ancient Greece, as Rogers did, did not take the sting out of any
sexual insinuation. The Greek myth of Pollux and Castor, whose origins were grounded in the
intraspecies rape of Leda and the Swan, ascribed an incestuous desire onto Stein and Toklas. For
those readers who knew their allusions, Rogers’s comparison formed part of the “paper trail
about homosexual realities” that were scattered across Stein’s narratives (Stimpson, 159).
The indeterminate characterization of Stein and Toklas’s relationship continued
throughout Rogers’s memoir. Stein is characterized as “sexless, […] a kind of dynamic neuter.
She was a robe surmounted by a head, no more carnal than a portly abbot” (Rogers, 43), and
Toklas is described as too ugly to be sexually attractive.
40
And yet, when their relationship is

39
W. G. Rogers, When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person (New York: Rinehart & Company,
1948), v.
40
The role of religious references in descriptions of Stein bears further consideration, especially in light of Toklas’s
conversion to Catholicism in 1957. For more on portrayals of Stein’s gender as masculine, see Coffman.
142
described as a collective unit, Rogers gets more suggestive. “One way to rile Miss Toklas, and
one out of many, is to tell her you suspect her touch in the Stein genius […] for that matter, the
better you knew them, the more you wondered whose light was being hidden under whose
bushel” (Rogers, 33). Amid the digs about Toklas’s irascibility, what Rogers describes is a kind
of sexual entanglement that emerges only in Stein’s artistic activity. It is in Stein’s “genius” that
the presence of Toklas’s “touch” becomes the object of inquiry. Speculation over Toklas’s role
as a source of creative energy for Stein acts as cover for Rogers’s hint at the sexual nature of
their lesbian relationship. This sexual suspicion can only be trafficked under the covers of a
shifting network of lights and bushels. The difficulty Rogers encountered in avoiding the
disclosure of Stein’s sexuality is implied in a letter he sent to Toklas, responding to her criticisms
of his memoir. “I think I should be thanked for what I did omit,” he wrote (quoted in Simon,
201). Through this vague comment, Rogers quietly implies the threat of sexual disclosure that
was within the scope of what he could divulge about Stein and Toklas.
All of this puts Toklas in a somewhat awkward position as she writes her Cookbook. She
wanted to bolster Stein’s reputation, and her publications were designed to extend the narrative
thread established in the Autobiography. But how did Toklas keep “the atmosphere of Baby’s
home” out of the public narrative when she was the mouthpiece for this home’s “atmosphere”?
My suggestion in the next section, when I turn to analyze the Cookbook more directly, is that this
tension was amplified for Toklas by the “private judgment” of sexual desire. While ostensibly
maintaining the bourgeois “respectability” of its central couple, the Cookbook also incorporates
sexual activity into its narrative by focusing on Stein and Toklas’s servants, who act as
representatives of an alternative, more openly libidinous version of the “private.” Toklas’s
narration of the sexual behavior among her cooks and housemaids brings the desires of Stein and
143
Toklas into the orbit of the sexual activity of their domestic staff. But the book’s revelations
about the sexual foibles of the servants has a destabilizing capacity upon its employers, revealing
the unspoken traffic between food and sex taking place in the Cookbook. The indeterminate
relationship between the culinary and the sexual in the Cookbook reflects the indeterminacy of
Stein’s – and, in a later period, Warhol’s – representation of sex on the surface of their artworks.
In these artworks, sexual acts and relationships appear detached from an overt articulation of
desire. It is Toklas, writing in her Cookbook as the representative of Stein’s private realm, who
implicitly questions just how detachable these desires can really be.

The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook: desire and the domestics

In What is Remembered Toklas recalls how Stein annoyed her once. She called Toklas “an old
maid mermaid.” It was a label that Toklas claimed she “resented”: “the old maid was bad enough
but the mermaid was quite unbearable.”
41
It is one of the few moments in this memoir where
Toklas reveals a disagreement between the pair. The recollection expresses the uncertain sexual
character of Toklas in these narratives. An “old maid mermaid” melds together the non-sexual
connotations of the “old maid” with the seductive charms of the “mermaid,” luring sailors onto
rocks. Toklas’s version of the “mermaid,” a mythological figure of pleasure and danger, is veiled
by the spinsterish air that is foregrounded in Stein’s label. But her reaction to this description –
one that, she writes with relief, “blew thin and wore away entirely” (Toklas [1963], 48) – is
equally telling. The spinsterish tag may be bad, but it is the perception of being a mermaid that
“was quite unbearable.” As she narrates her relationship with Stein, Toklas wishes above all to

41
Alice B. Toklas, What is Remembered (London: Michael Joseph, 1963), 48.
144
be removed from an association with desire and seduction, even as the perception of her by
others comes perilously close to these rocks.
This section focusses upon the relations that exist for Toklas outside of the abstinent
coterie social formation as it is represented by Stein and her in their respective narratives. I ask,
to begin with, one rather blunt question: who gets to have sex in Toklas’s Cookbook? Perhaps
surprisingly, considering the performance of prudery by this pair, the answer is not “no one.”
Even as Toklas follows Stein in putting the private onto public display in her book, the sex life of
its protagonists remains cordoned off from explicit mention in the Cookbook, maintaining the
middle-class respectability of their domestic existence. It is left to the domestic staff – the
servants, maids, and cooks who Toklas discusses – to enact this labor in the narrative.
This upstairs/downstairs dynamic is not subtly laid out. Toklas devotes an entire chapter
to complaining about the challenges that she and Stein faced holding onto their staff, “oblivious
to the power relations involved” (Vester, 164).
42
The major problem they encounter is that their
staff keep leaving the service to go and get married. At one point in their domestic travails, three
Breton sisters come and go at the first prospect of matrimony (Toklas [2004], 180–6). But this
slipstream of servants cannot last. The culmination of the domestic staff having their own private
lives, rather than simply serving the private life of Stein and Toklas, is that the latter couple must
face the “humiliating experience” of going to the employment office to look for help (186). The
sex lives of their servants threaten to soil the pair’s middle-class respectability, a respectability
that buttressed them against charges of sexual deviancy.

42
As both Vester and Linzie point out, these power relations – which are bound up in classist and racist attitudes
harbored by Toklas – are most acute in her condescending affection for her “Indo-Chinese” employee, Trac (Vester,
164–5, and Linzie, 179).
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But these romantic travails are not simply a disruption to the domestic rhythm of Stein
and Toklas. They also provide a space for erotic disclosures within Toklas’s narrative while
containing them to a lower-class, heterosexual realm. In this way, love affairs are not completely
excised from Toklas’s narrative. Instead, they simply circulate at one step removed from Stein
and Toklas’s relationship and the coterie world they inhabit. By creating this buffer between
them, Toklas relegates the sexual to something troublesome and unseemly that functions below
the expansive artistic practice of culinary creativity that she champions. If Toklas’s innovation is
to ground artistic activity within the private domain of the kitchen – a continuation of Stein
“aligning her writing with housework” in the Autobiography – then sexual desire operates as a
version of the private that is banished from her own culinary artistry.
43
Sex is something
indulged in by servants, not something to be countenanced in the relationship of Stein and
Toklas. Its appearance in the narrative, therefore, both consolidates and threatens the celibate
image of Stein and Toklas that they cultivate. Toklas trivializes these romantic interactions but
there are also moments in the narrative where they hint at her own sexual desires.
One episode points to the low opinion Toklas has for the sexual activity of her servants. It
involves a “gay and enchanting Austrian,” who cooks for Stein and Toklas (Toklas [2004], 43).
In the kitchen Kaspar seems like the ideal fit, rustling up “the most intricate and complicated
dishes” as well as little cakes that “represented objects appropriate to each person” in the
household – a book for Stein, a little dog for Toklas, a flower for the painter Sir Francis Rose,
and so forth (43). However, Kaspar’s skills as a chef are undercut by the mess of his own
romantic life. His predilection for “wine, women, and song” (43) throws the equilibrium of his
culinary production off-kilter. While Kaspar is engaged to one woman, Lili, he is also in a

43
Natalia Cecire, “Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein,” ELH 82, no.1 (Spring 2015): 304.
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relationship with a dark-haired “devil,” who threatens to kill him if they don’t get married. After
one attempt on his life, Kaspar elopes with this “devil,” leaving Stein and Toklas to comfort his
former fiancée over tea and “the last of Kaspar’s perfect Viennese pastry that we were to taste”
(45). Toklas implies that the loss of these gastronomic delicacies is the one felt most pertinently.
Whereas Kaspar left Lili his final wage packet, so that she could “buy herself a frivolité as a last
souvenir of her adoring Kaspar” (45), Toklas ends the anecdote with Lili marrying into an
“established bourgeois family” (46). It is Toklas who is the one who remains clinging onto one
of Kaspar’s keepsakes, ending the anecdote with a recipe for “A Tender Tart” that she calls “the
last souvenir of Kaspar” (46). The frivolité that Lili was instructed to buy has been superseded by
Toklas’s attachment to the feckless Kaspar and his “tender” pastries, a tenderness that ultimately
was not located in his romantic relationship but in his cooking. In this anecdote, Toklas implies
that the culinary bond between cook and consumer leaves a more permanent legacy than the
aborted desire of Kaspar’s romantic engagements.
In this episode, Toklas establishes a binary between culinary creativity and sexual desire,
where the art that Kaspar produces in the kitchen matters more than the tawdry details of his love
life. But by describing her relationship to Kaspar, Toklas inserts herself into the desires
circulating among her domestic staff, as she establishes a parallel between the pleasures of
cooking and sex in these anecdotes. Rather than including him in her chapter survey of domestic
staff, Toklas tells her tale of Kaspar in a chapter called “Murder in the Kitchen,” which begins:
“cookbooks have always intrigued and seduced me” (37). In this seduction of Toklas, a flash of
erotic relations within culinary production can be glimpsed in the Cookbook, one that feels at
odds with her description of the kitchen as a site of “murder.” Before we get to Kaspar, this
series of murders is a list of the animals who met their end at the hands of Toklas. Her victims
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are a “lively carp,” Blanchette the Barbery duck, and six white pigeons. These are acts of
“seduction” where the “rush of animal slaughter” is tied to “the erotic power of withholding”
(Finck, 134). Toklas keeps these acts of “murder” away from Stein, and is thus able to possess a
carnal knowledge of the dishes over which Stein licks her lips. But Kaspar’s placement in this
chapter doesn’t seem to fit the array of culinary corpses. Given Kaspar suspects being poisoned
by his “devil,” he can perhaps be aligned with the “murders” that end up on our dinner plates, his
own body a potential “delicacy” alongside his pastries. But Kaspar also stirs up the same
seductive longings in women that Toklas feels when she gets her hands on a cookbook. Toklas
compares the “seduction” that she experiences with Kaspar’s own lothario instincts, implicitly
acknowledging that, even as Toklas attempts to offer a clear distinction between food and sex,
the relationship between them is intertwined, as these two sensual forms jostle against each other
in a shared realm of private pleasures.
We can see in this episode how Toklas’s narration of the sex lives of her domestic
servants plays two primary roles in the text. The first is as a counterpoint, a sacrifice of culinary
creativity at the altar of dismal heterosexual relations. Toklas presents heterosexual desire – at
least as it appears in the sexual relations of her servants – as a tiresome obstruction. Kaspar
forsakes his tender tarts for a dissolute life with a dark-haired devil. Another example of this is
the drudgery faced by Nora, Toklas’s childhood cook, when she decides to settle down. Nora
used to rustle up such “treasures” as soufflé fritters, but she “left my mother’s kitchen when she
was nearly forty years old to marry a well-paid workman and she proceeded to produce five or
six children […] Nora who had been such an exquisite cook was now feeding her family,
including the youngest born, on canned food” (Toklas [2004], 97). The factory-line of incessant
childbirth is not the type of creative “production” that Stein or Toklas admires. In this reading,
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the result of heterosexual desire is the collapse of culinary standards, a waste of the treasures and
pleasures of the kitchen that have been exchanged for the indifferent churning out of “five or six
children” and a new-found dependence upon canned-food cuisine.
The second function of these descriptions of her servants is more surprising. Toklas’s
relationship with her staff is where she comes closest to disclosing her own sexual status. For at
its core this intimate relationship with paid strangers possesses its own perversity: “Gertrude
Stein used to say nothing seemed more unnatural to her than the way a servant, a complete
stranger, entered your home one day and very soon after your life and then left you and went out
of your life” (186). The unnaturalness of this arrangement blurs into what is kept private in the
text; Stein and Toklas’s lesbianism, of which the servants also possess an intimate knowledge.
44

In one anecdote, the blurring of these lines appears in the shape of a tentative, shared
erotic attraction that Stein and Toklas feel for one of their servants. Jeanne was, Toklas claims,
“a pearl,” who “graciously condescended to work for us” (Toklas [2004], 174). She was also a
“mystery.” Toklas locates this mystery in the fact that Jeanne was simultaneously “gentle and
had the smile of a cocotte, wore a complicated headdress and was as naïve and inexperienced as
a baby” (174). In this interplay between coquettish knowledge and babelike innocence, Jeanne is
framed as an erotic enigma. This sense of seductive mystery also suffuses her cooking: “Le
cuisine c’est la femme. Her sauces had unknown, delicate and still exotic flavors. A dish would
have an unexpected squeeze of orange juice. She used rum in all her desserts” (174). These
“exotic flavors” are originally ascribed by Stein and Toklas to Jeanne’s upbringing in
Pondicherry, a part of the orientalist logic that underpins all of Toklas’s interactions with cooks
from France’s colonies. But Toklas soon disregards this “foreignness” as the explanation for

44
Anna Linzie makes this point in her analysis of one incident when a servant departs the household because of
Stein and Toklas’s willingness to “live French” (Toklas [2004], 180). See Linzie, 178.
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Jeanne’s “strangeness” – her “subtly flavored food,” Toklas decides, “was neither from
Pondicherry nor Martinique, but her very own” (176). Jeanne’s food stands alone, reflective of
the distinct individuality of its creator, an extension of her role as a mysterious object of desire
for Stein and Toklas.
The sexual quality of Jeanne’s “mystery” becomes more apparent when the narrative
ends in the termination of her employment at the Rue de Fleurus. After Jeanne takes several days
off work, Stein and Toklas visit her apartment building to inquire about her health. The
concierge reveals Jeanne’s irregular work habits: “after several months’ work she would stay in
her room and not take on new work for a month or even longer. Always during this time, she
would go out at night and alone” (175). Like other encounters with their servants, the private life
of Jeanne unsettles the rhythm of the Stein and Toklas household. But Jeanne’s departure is not
due to the sound of wedding bells. Wandering the Parisian streets at night alone, Jeanne’s
implied sexual practice is a more transgressive one that can finance extravagant shopping trips:
“in bounced Jeanne gay as a lark, her arms filled with package of all sizes and shapes” (175). As
a result, Stein and Toklas reluctantly decide to dispense of her services. But the episode ends
with a peculiar admission from Toklas: “for a long time afterwards I went out of my way to pass
where she lived on the chance of seeing her, but never did. She was buried in one of the
department stores making her purchases. I always hoped she had gone across town for something
more satisfactory than window shopping” (179). The strangeness of Jeanne’s “mystery” has its
own peculiar effect on Toklas, who – independently of Stein – starts acting like a spurned lover,
stalking the streets of Jeanne’s neighborhood. Her fantasies project into the life of her now
former employee, claiming to know where she was (“buried in one of the department stores”)
and expressing a wish for where she might be. This final hope is its own subtle confession of
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desire for Jeanne. What are the pleasures that Toklas envisages, which Jeanne would find “more
satisfactory than window shopping”? Jeanne’s imagined capacity to go “across town” harbors the
euphemism of a sexual crossing, a longing that comes close to an explicit disclosure of Toklas’s
own private sexual desires.
In her interactions with servants, Toklas shows there’s erotic life in the “old maid
mermaid” yet. She recounts a series of relationships that reflect how competing senses of the
“private” operate within the Cookbook. This is not the same kind of “private” space as the
domestic existence of Stein and Toklas, which both of them made central to their popular
writing. The kind of “private” space that the servants occupy is the realm of sexual desire, seen
in a series of romantic liaisons that Toklas eschews in her representation of her coterie. What
these servants display is the exertive force of sexual desire, even as it is consigned to the
domestic staff. The sexual desires catalyzed by her servants threaten the constant motion of the
social world in which Stein and Toklas circulate. This is true in a practical sense – the departure
of Stein and Toklas’s servants interrupts their capacity to host dinner parties, which is an
important social component of their public domestic existence. But this disruption also functions
on a wider level, in how these desires intersect with the sexual identity of the Cookbook’s author.
Toklas does not state explicitly how the denigrated matter of sexual desire is entangled within
her own desires, just as Stein and Warhol feel no urge to articulate the content of their own
sexual desires in their artworks. The juicy details of this version of the private are reserved for
the domestic staff. But, in the case of Jeanne, we see how Toklas’s focus on her servants comes
close to revealing her own sexual desire in the Cookbook. The sex lives of the domestic staff
reflect the unstable definition of the private as Toklas formulates it in her Cookbook. The sexual
relationship of Stein and Toklas veers towards a public appearance in these encounters. How this
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instability shapes the dishes themselves is what I turn to consider now, examining the aesthetic
visions that Toklas and Warhol put forward in their respective cookbooks.

Alice Toklas, Andy Warhol: canned goods and eggy pleasures

I began this chapter by arguing, in line with other critics, that The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook puts
forward a claim for cooking as an art practice. This art emerges in the spectacle of a meal’s
performance, the silky effortlessness with which a chicken can be carved or a mutton can roast
itself into venison. But encoded within the sensorial abundance of a dish like “Gigot de la
Clinique” is an erotically charged relationship between the cook and their food. It is not hard to
think of the innuendo in Toklas’s instruction to inject a syringe into “the fleshy part of the gigot”
(Toklas [2004], 33). The sensual language within the act of culinary production also brings the
finished dish into the realm of sexual attraction. During the course of the marinating and
roasting, the meat is “perfumed” and becomes “strange and exquisite” (33). Toklas echoes this
language when she rhapsodizes over Jeanne later in the Cookbook’s narrative. This babelike
cocotte is described, alongside her food, as “delicate,” “exotic,” and “strange” (174). If, as
Toklas claims, “La cuisine c’est la femme” (174), then perhaps she has met her match with this
leg of mutton. In the equation between food and femme Toklas implicitly compares the culinary
and the sexual through the overlapping pleasure that is elicited in the carnal reception of either
meat or maid.
These points of erotic charge interact with Toklas’s aversion to publicly detailing the
sexual. This relationship is perceptible even in the titles of some of Toklas’s recipes. In these
titles, Toklas seems intent on keeping her dishes buttoned up. There are recipes for “Omelette in
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an Overcoat” (106), “Mutton Chops in Dressing Gowns” (101) and “Giant Squab in Pyjamas”
(111). Did Toklas feel the need to keep her meals clothed? Regardless of her intentions with
these titles, there is a waft of propriety that emanates from these pseudo-garments, one that suits
her author profile and the air of respectability she cultivated in the representation of her
relationship with Stein. The outfits act to seal off the libidinal play of her recipes and their
gastronomic excess – the diner may be bursting at the seams after consuming one of Toklas’s
rich dishes, but at least the dishes themselves are fittingly attired. However, the giant squab and
mutton chops are also suggestive of the part of the domestic household that Stein and Toklas
sought to keep private in their work – the bedroom. As the representative of Stein’s domestic
household, Toklas wrote from the position of the private, but she sought to avoid the sexual
connotations of this space. However, the Cookbook shows how culinary pleasures cycled back
and forth between the kitchen and the bedroom. While her meals may be wrapped in a dressing
gown, or trussed up in pyjamas, the perverse reader of the Cookbook might justifiably wonder
what pleasures are indulged in when the lights are out.
You could plausibly count Andy Warhol among these perverse readers. There’s no record
that he read Toklas’s Cookbook (although his former collaborator Ralph Pomeroy visited Toklas
in postwar Paris, and Warhol and Toklas had a mutual friend in Mercedes de Acosta).
45

Regardless, his own cookbook Wild Raspberries had Toklas’s gastronomic attitude in its sights,
parodying the vogue for French cooking that swept America in the nineteen-fifties. Illustrated by
Warhol in one of the final examples of his nineteen-fifties style, Wild Raspberries was intended
as “a funny cookbook for people who don’t cook” (quoted in Gopnik, 169). In contrast to the
many steps required for a dish like “Gigot de la Clinique,” the recipes, written by his collaborator

45
Indeed, in his biography of Warhol Blake Gopnik suggests that Toklas may have been one of de Acosta’s
“conquests” (Gopnik, 187). A salacious claim, although Gopnik cites no evidence for it.
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Suzie Frankfurt, prioritized culinary ease over activity. They had the veneer of complexity with
grand titles such as “Torte a la Dobasch” and “Dorothy Killgallens Gateau of Marzipan” but
were stripped of any arduous labor. As in the earlier à la Recherche du Shoe Perdu, there is a
dissonance between the illustrations and the words (and, at times, between the title of the dish
and its recipe); the drawings display a visual abundance that the recipes reveal was obtained
through minimal effort. Admittedly, “Piglet” may not sound too grandiose but the recipe further
undercuts the expectations of culinary creativity. It begins: “Contact Trader Vic’s and order a 40
pound suckling pig to serve 15. Have Hanley take the Carey Cadillac to the side entrance and
receive the pig at exactly 6.45” (Warhol and Frankfurt, n.p.). The exactitude of the numerical
details (pig weight, dinner party size, time of collection) is precise to the point of absurdity; the
details possess no purpose beyond their precision, and so this precision paradoxically feels
arbitrary. It is a recipe that requires no action, beyond picking up a phone. This lack of effort is
justified because the piglet is already there as an illustration, wrapped in a bow and placed on a
platter, a rose tucked between its lips. In this parodic version of a cookbook, Warhol’s drawing
of a pig is enough, the equivalent pleasure of an actual hog roast. Everything a hungry diner
would want to consume already exists on the surface of the text.
Rather than meals, Wild Raspberries produces a clique sensibility, one that celebrates
visual excess in the illustrations and abstention everywhere else. This abstention functions as a
sign of social elegance. The recipe for “Piglet” is the chance to tell Hanley to rev up the Carey
Cadillac, rather than do anything yourself. In this exaggerated world of sophistication there is the
assurance that everyone has a fancy limo and a chauffeur to drive it. Unlike the Cookbook, the
sensibility of Wild Raspberries betrays no concern that the domestic staff might upset the rhythm
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of the pair’s social life. Staff such as Hanley are simply facilitators for the social circulation of a
particular elite group, a coterie culture that orbits around ease.

Figure 2: Andy Warhol, “Piglet” in Wild Raspberries, n.p.

A Trader Vic’s piglet isn’t the only shop-bought wonder in the book. The entire recipe of
“Chocolate Balls a la Chambord” reads: “Decorate a ten inch round Silver Platter with
Marashino Cherries, fresh mint and almond filberts, Then Call up the Royal Pastry shop and
have them Deliver a Pound of high inch chocolate balls, serve only with no-Cal Ginger ale, To
be served to very thin People” (Warhol and Frankfurt, n.p.). Just as in “Piglet,” the cook’s role
remains a decorative one – in this recipe, they are entrusted with furnishing the platter and
ordering chocolate balls, and don’t even need to instruct Hanley to collect the delivery. Rather
than Chambord, the only liquid in sight of the finished dish is “no-Cal Ginger ale,” a slimming
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refreshment which anticipates the final instruction that it should be “served to very thin People.”
These ideal diners not only provide the humor of the recipe’s punchline. The historic association
between chicness and skinniness suggests that these individuals are the perfect participants in the
elite social world that Warhol is networking through his coterie texts of the nineteen-fifties. The
question of whether these “very thin People” will consume the chocolate balls is left
unanswered, for the indulgence of the dish has already been performed in the illustration. In fact,
the potential willingness of these thin people to resist eating the dish adds to this sense of
indulgence as it preserves the dish, unconsumed, within its visual abundance on the page.
Warhol’s mock-investment in the culinary displaces the primary purpose of a cookbook –
to instruct the reader in the practice of cooking. In this way, Wild Raspberries actually functions
as an extension of Toklas’s culinary creativity, which understood the carving of a chicken as its
own art form. In Warhol’s text this is taken to an extreme, so that the dishes eschew any private
labor involved in the meal’s production and consumption. Does that mean that the sexual, which
flickers in Toklas’s text through the pleasurable sensuality in the production and consumption of
the dishes, is absent from Warhol’s own culinary creativity? I believe so. Rather than cultivating
a private space within his text where a sexual subject resides, the focus of Warhol’s aesthetics of
minimal effort is in his cookbook’s performance of an elite sociability. Names of dishes
reference Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, and readers are told that “Oysters a la Harriman” is “a
great favorite of Princess Graca [sic] and should always be included on the menu should she
arrive for a midnight snack” (n.p.). With these gossipy tones, Wild Raspberries hints at the kind
of celebrity lifestyles that Warhol would position himself alongside throughout his artistic career.
But Warhol put an ironic spin on this attachment by putting his social ambition for this world on
display; there are no introspective sexual desires held back by Warhol that aren’t already
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apparent on the surface of his texts. While the social performance of Wild Raspberries reflects
the name-dropping of Toklas’s Cookbook, there is an important difference at its center. In the
Cookbook the social comings and goings of its narrative work to veil the primary relationship of
its narrative in order to preserve the privacy of Stein and Toklas’s sexuality. By contrast, Wild
Raspberries creates the impression of a coterie life that has nothing to disclose at its center.
Warhol’s artistic style was to change, but he maintained this posture of depersonalized
networking across the decades.
The differences in these cookbooks reflect a divergent attitude to their formulation of the
private within aesthetic pleasure. We see this contrast in two declarations Toklas made in the
Cookbook, one on canned food and one on eggs. Toklas’s attitude to the former is already
apparent in her classist lament over the tedious fate of Nora, the housekeeper who gets married
and is now dependent upon tinned goods in order to feed her growing family. Toklas returns to
this topic later in her narrative, when she describes walking through a supermarket in New
Orleans. She muses on the conditions that inspire “creative cooking”: “Can one be inspired by
rows of prepared canned meals? Never. One must get nearer to creation to be able to create, even
in the kitchen” (Toklas [2004], 131). In this statement, Toklas shows her faith in the terms of
inspiration and creation that inspire traditional artistic production. But these terms also have a
secondary function, in so much as they add a spatial depth to her aesthetic practice. The act of
creation is something one needs to get “nearer to” – it is not just there, in the form of a tin can,
ready to be grabbed off the shelves by the everyday consumer. The right materials for inspiration
are needed in order to burrow closer to the possibility of a genuinely creative act.
Toklas’s disdain for canned food reveals an obvious juxtaposition between her artistic
vision and Warhol’s, he who became famous through canned soup. Warhol’s 1962 Campbell’s
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Soup Can painting series challenges the terms that Toklas uses to conceive of art. Why “get
nearer to creation” in art, when one could produce an artwork that “simply reiterates […] the
original mode of the referent’s manufacture” (Silver, 198)? This reiterative function means there
is no getting nearer to creation, for everything is there already on the surface of the tin can. As
Silver argues, the idea of artistic depth is one that Warhol resists in his aesthetic practice. The
contrasting attitudes of Toklas and Warhol are apparent at this point of comparison. Toklas
believes in the possibility of depth in the process of artistic production, whereas Warhol resists
anything operating below the surface of his texts. This divergence in their respective coterie
aesthetics suggests that, for all the ways that Toklas’s lesbian relationship with Stein appears as a
“paper trail” in the representation of their domesticity, she haphazardly preserves a private space
in her cookbook where an erotic sexual desire is withheld from the “private judgments” of her
contemporaries. This influences the importance she places on artistic depth within her
description of culinary creativity.
The primary argument of this chapter has been this one. Toklas’s commitment to Stein’s
legacy means she keeps a part of their relationship private – the part in which sexual desire
percolates – like a final, horny little matron in a Matryoshka doll, perpetually held back from the
published description of their social life together. We might frame this as the place of the closet,
the result of Toklas’s unwillingness to expose herself, and – more importantly in her eyes –
Stein, to the judgments of the period’s homophobic literary culture. No doubt these fears
contributed to Toklas’s intentions. But I want to conclude by suggesting that there is another
motivation behind Toklas’s continued investment in keeping things private. The private is not
only a shield for Toklas. It also harbors its own potential pleasures – sexual or otherwise – where
the act of withholding holds a tantalizing, unknowable form.
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Figure 3: Andy Warhol, “Hard Boiled Eggs” in Wild Raspberries, n.p.

Toklas articulates these pleasures in an unusual parallel she makes between art and
cooking. Her recipes, she claims, “are most of them a slow evolution in a new direction, which is
the way great art is created […] Even a way of cooking an egg can be arrived at in this way.
Then that way becomes a classical way. It is a pleasure for us, perhaps for the egg” (Toklas
[2004], 139). Just as in her distaste for canned goods, Toklas expresses her faith in a process of
getting “nearer” to the act of creation, this time within the slow evolution of artistic innovation.
This closeness, one that does not appear in Warhol’s artistic practice, is not just about a linear
sense of creative progression. It is also about an intermingling of pleasures that occurs between
the artist and their materials as they “get nearer” to the act of creation. It is this attitude that leads
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Toklas to her strange speculation about what sort of pleasures an egg might derive from this
creative process. Who provides these eggy pleasures, and what form could they take? The point,
I believe, is in the unknowability of the form pleasure takes for the egg. Cracked or in its shell,
the egg functions as a space of mystery within the public narrative of Toklas’s culinary
creativity, one that might yet contain erotic pleasure within it. Impassive, unknowable, it stands
for the fundamental indeterminacy that Toklas cultivates in her representation of the private in
the Cookbook. Indeterminate as it is, the private provides pleasures through its elusive forms, for
us as well as the egg.
The recipe for “Hard Boiled Eggs” in Wild Raspberries also makes a claim to artistry. It
begins: “this may seem an unimportant matter to the ordinary cook, but this may seem an
unimportant matter to the ordinary cook, but significant art” (Warhol and Frankfurt, n.p.).
Whether a typo or not, the claim to artistic significance loses its force with this repetition.
Hinging on the reiterative “but” of the sentence, it makes “significant art” appear tautological
with “an unimportant matter to the ordinary cook,” rather than opposed to it. Unlike Toklas’s
text, no further explanation of the egg’s artistry is provided by its authors. This art is about a
collective uniformity of eggs (“it is essential that all eggs be immersed in the water at precisely
the same time”) rather than the potential pleasures of one single egg. Indeed, unknowable eggy
pleasures do not factor into the creative practice of the dish. In the drawing there is a series of
white eggs stacked together in a pyramid shape, a little feather poking from the top. They rest on
a platter, atop of various eggs that are exposed, cut open to reveal their yolk. As with all of
Warhol’s drawings in Wild Raspberries there is no sense of proportion. Everything that there is
to see appears on the surface of the illustration, the big yolky center as visually available to the
reader as the white exterior. In this illustration, the outer and the inner of the egg are as equally,
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arbitrarily knowable as each other; the only thing that’s missing is the chicken. There is no
private center of the egg to which the art of cooking can get “nearer” in its pursuit of creation.
This is because, as I have been exploring throughout this chapter, the conception of creation is
conceived differently in Warhol’s aesthetic practice. Warhol’s art developed from Stein’s
representation of her domestic life in the Autobiography but superseded her creative vision, at
least in the form that Toklas extended it in her Cookbook. This means that in his aesthetics,
sexual desire is not preserved from private judgments, but exists like everything else within the
flatlining surface of his artworks. To Warhol, unlike Toklas, an egg is an egg is an egg. There is
no private sexual selfhood held back within its yolk.
In 1959, Andy Warhol was on the cusp of taking his coterie aesthetic practice and
becoming an art world celebrity. Unlike Toklas, he wasn’t seeking to be effaced within the
subordinate position of a creative couple. Therefore, the Factory life of the nineteen-sixties, as a
coterie space, was always going to work differently in relation to the singularity of the artistic
profile he created. Warhol, in the Factory films, impressed his idea of social relations onto the
flat surface of his artworks, avoiding spatial distinctions. Compare this to how Stein and Toklas
formulate their own coterie existence and the private sexual life they avoided disclosing through
their representation of this exclusive social formation. In her cookbook, Toklas relied upon a
divide between the public and the private, in order to navigate the weird duality of her position
after Stein’s death. At this moment in her career Toklas was both the gatekeeper to her partner’s
reputation and the lesbian that she was trying to gatekeep people from recognizing in Stein. This
set up a series of tensions for her representation of their relationship, ones that animate the
discussions of culinary creativity and her social life that Toklas conducts in her cookbook.
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I have tracked these tensions in this chapter. But finally, I am also suggesting that Toklas
created a spatial interior known as the “private” in her text’s representations of food and
consumption in order to point to the possible, unknowable pleasures that exist within this
internalized realm. This is not just about the pleasures of the egg; nor is it just about the queer
desires that might lie within its uncracked shell. Toklas’s private pleasures speak to the contained
space of the coterie, and the revelatory, affirmative desires that might also exist within the
borders of this social formation. These desires are, at least in terms of the Cookbook, speculative;
it is not something that can be accessed in the surface narrative of their social lives that Stein and
Toklas – and Warhol – represent in their respective artworks. But, at the very least, the coterie as
a possible site of pleasures – ones that can’t be communicated outside of the coded, insular
language of the clique – gestures towards an idea that the intimate attachments that structure
exclusive social relations can be positive, as well as painful. With her eggy pleasures, as well as
her devotion to Stein, Toklas represents the coterie’s privacy as a site that might exist beyond the
negative judgments of the period. This was even if this social formation possessed value in the
same way as the artist Picabia’s scrambled eggs; with “a suave consistency that perhaps only
gourmets will appreciate” (Toklas [2004], 30), rather than with the disclosure of these pleasures
to the popular audiences that these three artists were also able to attract.

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CHAPTER FOUR
GIVING AWAY SECRETS: PARKER TYLER, PETTY GENIUSES, AND TRIBUTES TO THE
CLIQUE

In the summer of 1968, the film critic and poet Parker Tyler received some unexpected – perhaps
unwanted – popular attention. The mother of his boyfriend, the underground filmmaker Charles
Boultenhouse, told him she’d come across his writing in the magazine Cosmopolitan. For a critic
like Tyler, this came as something of a shock. “I thought she meant the sex thing and got set…”
Tyler wrote to Boultenhouse.
1
His hesitation towards talking shop with Boultenhouse’s mother
on the subject of the “sex thing” – probably an article that ended up in one of his later books,
Sex, Psyche, Etcetera (1969), or Screening the Sexes (1972) – echoes how he felt about his wider
public reception. He “got set,” bracing himself presumably to justify an idea that Boultenhouse’s
mother might deem perverse. It was a response that Tyler had encountered many times over the
course of his career. Copies of his 1933 novel The Young and Evil, co-authored with Charles
Henri Ford, were destroyed by US authorities when they were transported from Paris because of
the book’s sexually explicit content. Steeped in the language of psychoanalysis and surrealism,
his nineteen-forties film criticism on Hollywood also revolved around sex: the Electra Complex
in Mildred Pierce (1945); impotency in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944); hermaphroditism in The
Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). The outlandish sexual claims of Tyler’s analyses of popular
culture, alongside the verbosity of his writing style, were too “specialist” for a mass public,
wrote Ford in his diary: “suitable only for a so-called ‘intellectual’ audience” (Ford [2001], 21).
For anyone outside of this “intellectual audience,” Tyler’s writing tended to generate feelings of

1
Tyler to Boultenhouse, 23 August 1968, in the Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, 1927–1994, New
York Public Library, Box 2.
163
indifference or hostility, as was borne out by his struggles to be published over the course of his
career.
But it transpired that Tyler had been steeling himself for nothing: “it seems that
Cosmopolitan magazine (Aug) got the idiotic idea to let their readers in on Myra by publishing a
long excerpt, in which I am generously mentioned” (To Boultenhouse, 23 August 1968).
Boultenhouse’s mother had been confused by the article. When chatting to Tyler, she mistakenly
thought he was the author of Myra Breckinridge, a novel by Gore Vidal that had been published
earlier that year, an extract of which Cosmopolitan was reprinting in its August issue. Actually,
Tyler had only enjoyed a supporting role within this work of fiction. His book Magic and Myth
in the Movies (1947) serves as the theoretical guide for Vidal’s titular character, Myra, as she
navigates contemporary Hollywood. Myra is a transsexual woman who arrives in Los Angeles
seeking to make her fortune via an inheritance claim on the profitable drama school run by the
uncle of her “dead husband” Myron. While she is in pursuit of this financial windfall, Myra’s
main ambition is to complete Myron’s manuscript on Hollywood cinema, entitled “Parker Tyler
and the Films of the Forties; or, the Transcendental Pantheon.”
2
The extract that appeared in
Cosmopolitan included Myra’s lavish praise of Tyler as “our age’s central thinker,” whose
theory on Hollywood “is perhaps the only important critical insight this century has produced.”
3

It was this reference that led Boultenhouse’s mother into thinking this was an article by Tyler,
and that Myra was a real individual planning to write a book about him.
It was perhaps no wonder that Boultenhouse’s mother was eager to talk to Tyler about the
article, given the glowing terms of this popular tribute to a little-known film critic, but her
misreading of the situation stretches credulity. Of all the figures I have focused on in this

2
Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge and Myron (New York: Vintage, 1987), 16.
3
Gore Vidal, “Myra Breckinridge,” Cosmopolitan 165, no.2 (August 1968): 111.
164
dissertation, Tyler is perhaps the most “coterie” of the lot. His correspondence testifies to his
deep commitment to maintaining the relationships that were most intimate to him, but they are
also filled with accounts of his battles to get recognition even from his friends, let alone a public.
He was constantly expressing his doubts about whether his peers have read his articles and
books, and he was highly sensitive to the judgments implicit in the silence of his social circle
whenever his latest work was published. As a representative figure of the coterie artist – an
intimate friend of Ford’s and a passing acquaintance of Bowles and Toklas – Tyler sometimes
appears lost even within the clique relations of his social network.
It’s therefore understandable that Tyler seems a little cagey in his own reaction to Vidal’s
“tribute” to him. He called Cosmopolitan’s decision to publish the extract “idiotic,” but then also
notes that he was “generously mentioned” in the piece. It is not quite an irreconcilable
opposition, but it indicates the mixed feelings Tyler had about his inclusion in Myra
Breckinridge. The tone of his word choice is unclear here. Was he being sarcastic when he
described Vidal’s reference to him as “generous”? What’s so “idiotic” about Cosmopolitan’s
decision to publish an extract from Myra Breckinridge? Was that dismissal an assessment of the
magazine’s readership, that a subversive, salacious novel like Vidal’s would fly over the heads of
the general public, just as Tyler’s saucy film criticism had? And what did Tyler mean when he
describes this publication as Cosmopolitan “letting their readers in on Myra,” as if this novel – a
New York Times bestseller on its first publication – was a secret about which the public was not
yet “in the know”? In Tyler’s offhand comment to Boultenhouse, as he recounts a fairly
innocuous telephone exchange, he establishes a dynamic of secrecy and exposure that circles
around the uncertainty of Vidal’s popular tribute to him.
165
Tyler was grappling with some of these uncertainties in his own writing of the period. He
had spent the majority of the nineteen-sixties working on a biography of his friend, the painter
Pavel Tchelitchew, which was published in 1967, a year before Myra Breckinridge. It had been a
lengthy, attritional experience, which in a way wasn’t helped by Tyler’s personal intimacy with
his subject. He had got to know Tchelitchew, who died in 1957, through Ford, the artistic
gadabout with whom Tyler had been collaborating since the late nineteen-twenties. I discussed
Ford’s tempestuous relationship with Tchelitchew in chapter one of this dissertation. The couple
were together for the final twenty years of the latter’s life, and by his reckoning Tyler had often
played third wheel to the pair. This intimacy gave him privileged access to Tchelitchew’s
materials because he was embedded within the same social network as the painter. But Tyler
recognizes that this was not a relationship of equals. While he was a devoted admirer of the
painter – to the extent that he wrote a five-hundred-page tome about his dead friend –
Tchelitchew (at least according to Tyler’s biography), was not quite so in awe of his new friend:
“he finds me amiable and bland,” Tyler wrote in The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew, “a
good listener and one who praises without being sloppy” (Tyler [1969], 379). Tyler’s
“blandness” is the most definitive quality here. It’s the one that ensures he listens well and
praises without gushing, but it’s not a very pleasing trait to recognize about yourself; it’s also the
thing that perhaps makes him overlooked even in his clique relations. When reading himself
through Tchelitchew’s eyes, Tyler diminishes his own social standing within the hierarchies of
New York’s art world; Tchelitchew can apparently see that Tyler possesses “no position
whatever and scant promise of any” (379). Tyler’s claim to intimacy with Tchelitchew, which
buttresses the authority of his biographical tribute, is tied to an exposure of his personal
limitations, a reduction of his social standing within the artistic cliques they inhabited. In this
166
hierarchical social world, Tyler reads himself as bland and unpromising when placed next to the
commanding presence of Tchelitchew.
Tyler was not only addressing the limitations of his own social position with The Divine
Comedy. He also confronted the thorny question about what he could publicly reveal about his
subject. It is a problem of indiscretion that preoccupies him from the outset of his narrative.
Tyler refers to the advice of Edith Sitwell, one of Tchelitchew’s great friends and leading
patrons, after Tyler solicited her opinion about whether “a biographer ought to guess, or seek to
learn, his subject’s inmost secrets:”
It was a deliberately leading question and her evasion of it assumed a
significant form. ‘Don’t,’ she said in her distant bell-like tones, ‘hand
him over to the wolves.’ The word, wolves, given the full vowel
treatment, reverberated like a warning. (7)
Tyler was performing an intricate triangulation between what he felt ought to be disclosed and
what he was in fact disclosing. At this moment in his narrative, he kept the existence of
Tchelitchew’s “inmost secrets” veiled, but this indeterminacy is not resolved by Sitwell’s advice
to protect her friend from critical scrutiny. If Tyler classifies her response as an “evasion,” then
his incorporation of her words in his biography is equally shifty, for it discloses the social
mechanisms of secret-keeping (Sitwell’s “warning” to Tyler) even as it withholds the content of
Tchelitchew’s “secrets” from the reader. But, as I show over the course of this chapter, Tyler’s
characterization of Tchelitchew as a dysfunctional, fundamentally social animal is the major
revelation of his biography. The narrative of Tchelitchew’s life and career, as told by Tyler, is
one in which the painter has already handed himself over to the “wolves” of his social world
through his own behavior. Tchelitchew is, in fact, the most lupine creature on this scene,
prepared to ravenously consume any of his friends in order to enhance his career. While
Sitwell’s words may reverberate “like a warning” to Tyler, they also resound within the
167
trajectory of his book’s narrative structure, one that meticulously details the prosaic pettinesses
of Tchelitchew’s social existence.
My chapter explores how Tyler integrates these clique details into an epic narrative
structure, negotiating the latent transgression of his biography’s revelations by amplifying the
mythical scale of his subject. The gossipy disclosures of Tyler’s The Divine Comedy are
organized around Dante’s stages of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise (although Tyler reversed the
order of that epic’s celestial ascent), each of which is mapped onto an extended reading of one of
the painter’s artworks. Separated into three sections – and one short interlude where he describes
his methodology – Tyler’s narrative begins in Paradise, incongruously claiming this beatific state
for the circumstances surrounding Tchelitchew’s death in 1957. The narrative then shifts to
Purgatory, which describes the painter’s aristocratic upbringing in Russia and his family’s
departure in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. The final, longest, section focusses upon
Tchelitchew’s navigation of his social network in the wake of World War I, as he hopped across
Western Europe’s capitals and over to New York in the nineteen-thirties, where he and Ford
stayed until a final move to Italy in the nineteen-fifties. Tyler represents this period as Hell
through an analysis of Tchelitchew’s painting Phenomena (1936–38). Phenomena, which I
consider in greater depth later in the chapter, depicts individuals from Tchelitchew’s social
network in the visual form of “freaks,” an interest that Tchelitchew shared with both popular and
coterie artists like Truman Capote, Carson McCullers and Jane Bowles. As “a portrait of the
artist’s dynamic relations with society” (120), the painting shows a collective of teeming horrors
within a dystopic landscape. But Tyler argues that an attention to the “hidden language of
symbols” (398) in a painting like Phenomena pushes past a “shallow” reading of the painting as
a form of social gossip (393). How convincing this argument feels, as Tyler attempts to reconcile
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his emphasis on the artist’s cliquey social relations with his claims for Tchelitchew’s artistic
genius, I assess later in this chapter.
As a tribute to a coterie art world figure, written in the late nineteen-sixties, Tyler’s book
contrasts distinctly with the treatment he personally received from Vidal in Myra Breckinridge.
Vidal has repeatedly been the foil in my dissertation, a ready-made villain in my project’s
narrative structure because he was so vocally dismissive of most of the subjects I have analyzed
here. But in this chapter, for all the differences between Tyler’s extensive, intrusive biographical
evaluation of his friend’s life and the pointed references of Vidal’s satire of gender and sexuality,
I want to emphasize the throughline between these two writers and the ways they treat their
respective subjects. Both these tributes are marked by ambivalence in their attitude to the social
formation of the clique, an ambivalence that is expressed through their representation of these
coterie artists. Vidal and Tyler – one a self-styled public intellectual, the other an exclusively
“specialist” critic – each accentuate the negativity of the clique. Vidal does this through his mean
camp treatment of Tyler, whereas Tyler focusses on the psychic and physical harm that was
exacted upon Tchelitchew as a result of his investment in the clique’s social machinations.
However, what we see in both these texts – and Tyler’s biography especially – is a lingering
attachment to the experience of this social formation, in spite of these authors’ reservations about
it. Over this chapter, I analyze feelings of ambivalence as they pertain to the writings of Vidal
and Tyler. These were two figures working on their artistic profiles at the tail-end of America’s
midcentury creative culture, in an art world that had consistently displayed cliquish social
tendencies, even as a cliquish artistic practice was denigrated within intellectual discourse. The
impact of this uncertain attitude towards the clique, especially its effect upon writers who were
169
themselves uncertain about their own clique relations, is what I explore for the rest of this final
chapter.

Gore Vidal: trans secrets and mean camp

It makes sense that Parker Tyler didn’t know how to respond to Myra Breckinridge, for the
balance between affection and derision of the novel’s satire is itself unclear. Camille Paglia, in
an introduction to a recent edition, argues that “commentators on Vidal too casually treat his
Parker Tyler theme as a dismissive lampoon,” but she doesn’t really ponder over what this
tribute might be if it is not ridicule.
4
Certainly, there was a material benefit for Tyler, as Vidal’s
references to him did lead to a brief flurry of public interest in his work, one that extended
beyond Boultenhouse’s mother and resulted in the 1970 reissue of his first two books, The
Hollywood Hallucination (1944) and Magic and Myth of the Movies (1947). But the film critic
Richard Schickel, in his introduction to these reissues, sought to distance Tyler from Vidal’s
novel, which he called an “extended sick joke” that stemmed from the gender confusion of the
novel’s “hero–heroine–whatchamacallit.”
5
Vidal’s novel also stood in ambiguous relation to the
transphobia of critics like Schickel. Myra Breckinridge mocked, as well as capitalized upon, the
outrage it elicited (on the back cover of the 1986 reissue of the novel it included a quote from a
Time magazine review: “has literary decency fallen so low?”). But Vidal, as I show in this
section, was also mocking Myra’s gender performance, using the perceived dissonance of his

4
Camille Paglia, “On Myra Breckinridge and the Life of Gore Vidal,” Literary Hub (27 June 2019),
https://lithub.com/on-myra-breckinridge-and-the-life-of-gore-vidal/, n.p.
5
Parker Tyler, Magic and Myth of the Movies, introduction by Richard Schickel, reprint (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1970), x.
170
character’s transsexuality to make a set of claims about sexual desire.
6
To that end, an
understanding of Vidal’s tribute to Tyler requires a reckoning with his wider representation of
gender and sexuality in Myra Breckinridge. The extent to which Tyler was a “figure of camp
derision” in the novel rests upon Vidal’s attitude towards Myra.
7
The novel’s exploration of
sexuality and gender produces a distinctive camp sensibility that, in the intertwined relationship
of Tyler and Myra, illuminates Vidal’s perspective on the clique as well.
Vidal connects these two figures by using Tyler’s outlandish film theories about
Hollywood cinema as a way to illuminate Myra’s character. Her devotion to Tyler’s musings
bolsters the reader’s impression of her as humorously deluded, as a pretentious individual who
over-identifies with a sex-obsessed, overly intellectualized iteration of Hollywood glamor. This
devotion to Hollywood manifests itself in Myra’s appearance. If Tyler’s Magic and Myth of the
Movies is the theoretical gloss of this movie-star image, then Myra’s body is its practice. Her
physique is modelled on Hollywood’s golden age; she is a corporeal homage to “blessed
celluloid” who struts her stuff with “superbly shaped breasts reminiscent of those sported by Jean
Harlow” (Vidal [1987], 4–5). The construction of movie-star glamor works in service to Myra’s
display of sexual power, as she toys with men “in ways convenient to her tyrannous love” (16).
Her Hollywood looks and rapacious libido make her “the voice and agent of doom for the
traditional American male.”
8
Thus, Tyler’s movie criticism serves as the foundational text that
animates Myra’s pursuit of dominance over the male sex, a pursuit that is the dynamic force of

6
Christine Jorgensen, the most famous transgender women in midcentury America, was acutely aware that the trans
woman was an object of mockery in Myra Breckinridge. She complained that Vidal had “no scientific knowledge of
his subject,” and considered the possibility of legal action. See Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of
Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 204.
7
Leo Braudy, “Movie Mythographer,” New York Times (15 August 1971).
8
Kate Bornstein, “Gender Terror, Gender Rage” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and
Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 239.
171
the novel’s narrative. In this central way, Vidal’s representation of Tyler is intimately tied to his
representation of Myra.
But Tyler’s film criticism also shapes Myra Breckinridge in a less overt manner. In his
preface to Magic and Myth of the Movies, Tyler describes his critical aim as the longing to
expose the foundational myths of Western culture, myths that he argues Hollywood continues to
perpetuate. By myths, he refers to “the basic vestigial patterns surviving in popular imagination
and reflecting the unconscious desires and the secret remnants of the primitive belief in magic”
(Tyler [1947], xxiii). With this definition, Tyler frames his movie criticism as an act of
excavation, dredging up “desires” and exposing collective “secrets” that – in the Hollywood
cinema he analyzes – orbit around different forms of sexuality that were prohibited from being
represented on the screen.
The plot of Myra Breckinridge also turns upon a foundational “secret”: the revelation that
Myra is transsexual. The narrative builds up to the moment where Myra discloses her past life as
Myron, who she previously claimed was her deceased husband. While the narration is peppered
with heavy-handed hints about her “real” gender Myra is reluctant to disclose this history, but in
order to claim her fortune she is compelled to reveal her prior identity. She performs this
revelation in spectacular fashion, dropping her underwear in the office of her uncle Buck Loner
to show off the scar where her penis used to be. In this episode Myra discloses the “truth” behind
her gender performance and the sexual power she displays through her femininity.
This tango of disclosure took place in the marketing of the novel as well. The
promotional materials of Myra Breckinridge were built around the idea that there was a salacious
secret about the novel’s principal character. The Cosmopolitan extract, for example, was
prefaced with the magazine’s copy inviting its readers to “meet Myra, (or, at least as much of her
172
as we dare show you!)” (Cosmopolitan [August 1968], 111). The marketing of the novel became
a question of what publishers and reviewers would “dare” to reveal about the character’s gender
status – that there was a secret to disclose was a major component to the novel’s tantalizing
appeal. It recalls Tyler’s attitude towards Tchelitchew, where he feeds his biographical subject
“to the wolves” even as he avoids explicitly stating exactly what this meal is. The structure of the
secret is enough of a revelation. But ultimately, in the same way that Tyler – as we shall see –
does reveal Tchelitchew’s “secrets,” Myra’s transsexuality was hardly hidden. It was an “open
secret,” Guy Davidson argues, one that “contemporary reviewers invariably gave away […] just
as invariably stating that any intelligent reader would guess it.”
9
Myra was announced with her
secrets practically bulging into public consciousness. Her display of gender dared the popular
audience to look at the legible shape of a sexual “truth” that publishers claimed they were not
bold enough to show, even as they left little to the public imagination about what Myra’s
supposedly hidden past might be.
The “open secret” of Myra Breckinridge functions in parallel to Tyler’s film criticism,
which was invested in the need to uncover a truth behind the surface appearance of Hollywood
cinema. With this parallel, Vidal’s references to Tyler implicitly acknowledge the trans subject
matter of his novel. Myra Breckinridge is an extended explication that – in the world of Myra, as
in the criticism of Tyler – the surface appearance “is not the thing.”
10
But there is also a central
difference between Tyler and Vidal’s representation of the “secrets” they expose. Tyler’s
definition of “myth” is echoed in Myra’s main stated ambition: “the destruction of the last
vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing

9
Guy Davidson, Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2019), 129.
10
Parker Tyler, The Hollywood Hallucination, introduction by Richard Schickel, reprint (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1970), 3–21.
173
population while increasing human happiness and preparing humanity for its next stage” (Vidal
[1987], 36, Vidal’s italics). Here, Tyler’s desire to uncover the “vestigial patterns” of myth in
Hollywood cinema has mutated into Myra’s destructive fantasy of the “last vestigial traces of
manhood,” one that she plans to achieve through her dominance of the same visual medium that
Tyler was analyzing in his criticism. While Tyler looks to expose the remnants of past myths,
Myra’s efforts are directed towards the eradication of the final scraps of traditional masculinity.
Myra’s scorched-earth policy towards men suggests a divergent attitude with regards to the
exposure of secrets, compared to the film criticism of her muse. Although references to Tyler
serve as an expression of Myra’s camp sensibility, Tyler’s film criticism drives towards the
exposure of “secrets” that Myra the character seeks to veil in her gender performance.
The uncovering of Myra’s gender status – which is the titillating pseudo-revelation of the
narrative – is followed immediately in the plot by the unraveling of the gender dominance that
she has previously achieved. In constructing his narrative this way, Vidal critiques Myra’s
ambition for a “realignment of the sexes” by way of her transsexuality. This “realignment” takes
place for Vidal on a very literal level, through Myra’s sex change operation and the “destruction”
of the penis that this operation entails. Myra’s scar is represented as her own “last vestigial trace”
of manhood, one that she cannot fully eradicate. In revealing her scar, Myra also reveals the
power of the phallus within her. While she believes her movie-star hyper-femininity subsumes
her past male identity, the exposure of her secret constitutes the admission that her maleness, as
it manifests upon her body, cannot be scrubbed out. Myra’s transsexuality suggests that there is a
mobility to the body and its sex organs in the construction of gender. But Vidal is in fact
asserting the fundamental entrenchment of gender at this corporeal level.
174
One example of this assertion is how Myra claims power over characters through the size
of her sex organs. She considers herself a paragon of femininity by the size of her ample bosom;
she is “disturbingly beautiful […] with large breasts hanging free” (Vidal [1987], 7). By contrast,
Myra deems her male counterparts as unsatisfactory because of what they lack in the physical
department. The cocks she encounters are insubstantial: “small and rather dismal-looking,” she
says of one (85); another is “all potatoes and no meat” (145). The male body in Myra
Breckinridge lacks a physical phallic potency, a bodily diminishment that functions as a
metaphor for the transference of power from man to woman. This power transference culminates
in a scandalous scene when Myra – at this point not “out” as trans in the narrative – commits a
penetrative rape of a male student, Rusty, with a strap-on dildo. In this moment, Myra “exacted
retribution by sexually humiliating” men, “teaching them that their buttocks were erotic
fodder.”
11
It is a lesson that men, too, can be sexually objectified. But it also reveals a faith in the
body as a fixed site of gender construction. Men are lacking because they have small penises;
Myra is powerful because she has big boobs; and the way she shows this power is through her
rape of Rusty.
Within the bodily terms of her female empowerment, Myra’s gender performance claims
the power of the phallus. That Myra once possessed a penis is, for Vidal, the satirical humor of
the novel. Her sexual behavior functions as a phantom limb of her missing member. In this way,
the power of Myra’s hyper-femininity reconsolidates the gender norms that her sexual behavior
appears to challenge, because the phallic force of her original sex organ is latent within her
power over men. This is the apparent contradiction that Vidal identifies in his trans character.
For all the ways in which she dresses as an especially glamorous version of femininity, Myra still

11
Wayne Koestenbaum, “The Rape of Rusty” in My 1980s and Other Essays (New York: FSG, 2013), 146.
175
behaves “like a man” in her claim to sexual power, implicitly affirming the “truth” of her body’s
past sex organs.
This past returns at the end of the novel when the power of Myra’s gender subjectivity is
subordinated to her bodily past. In the novel’s conclusion, Myra is hit by a car and, while in the
hospital, she has her breasts unwittingly removed because they contain dangerous levels of
silicone. Trapped in her hospital bed, she grows a beard and “turns back” into a man, settling
down to a suburban existence as a Christian Scientist in the San Fernando Valley. Myra’s
identity as a “New Woman” (4) – and the claims to power she makes through this status –
disappear in the resolution of Vidal’s finale. Her descent into conventionality, where she turns
into an especially mundane kind of man, satirizes the vehemence of Myra’s performance of her
femininity. Her body – and its male past – ends up asserting itself, dictating her gender more
forcefully than her independent will to power. As much as the reader is meant to laugh at the
underwhelming man Myra has become, the end of the novel also frames her transsexuality as a
delusion that cannot be sustained by the will of her desires alone.
Vidal was using the contradictions he perceived in Myra’s transsexuality as a way to
critique modern sexuality. Through his novel, he championed a theory of universal bisexuality,
one that he believed put him at the vanguard of popular sexual expression, steering public
discourse about sex in the United States.
12
For Vidal, sexual desire was not something to be
straightjacketed into discrete identity categories, divvied out between a vapid heterosexual
majority and a vilified homosexual minority. The erotics of sexual fantasy were, he argued, more

12
Vidal’s biographer Fred Kaplan writes: “Myra (who had once been Myron) was more victim than victimizer. The
sex-change operation embodied his/her capability for bisexual roles. But in her tormented expression of sexual and
psychological instability, it also disembodied society’s self-destructive rules about sex and gender.” Kaplan, 579–80.
For more on the place of Myra Breckinridge within this period of overt sexual representations see Davidson,
Categorically Famous, 125–49. The novel’s re-evaluation of the sexes also aligned Vidal and his novel with
emerging feminist movements. On the political shift that these movements instigated, see Robert O. Self, All in the
Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: FSG, 2012).
176
free-floating. He argued that pornographers understood this, and this is what made them the lay
philosophers of sexuality, for they “bring what we think about sex and what we say about sex
and what we do about sex into some kind of realistic relationship.”
13
The place of fantasy in the
formation of sexual desire is, to Vidal, “realistic;” but he presents the role of fantasy in Myra’s
gender formation as a delusion. In contrast to his “realistic” understanding of sexual desire, Vidal
represents Myra’s gender as unsustainable because of the gap between the fantasy performance
of her femininity and a past bodily reality that – for all its apparent fluidity – continued to
determine her social and sexual behavior. Sexual desire, to Vidal, is fluid; gender is fixed.
With its convergence of sexuality and gender, Myra Breckinridge formulated a camp
sensibility that resembled the one Susan Sontag popularized in her career-making turn for
Partisan Review. “Notes on Camp” (1964) had propelled Sontag into stardom as a public
intellectual, to the extent that Vidal referenced her in Myra Breckinridge through the name of
Myra’s dentist-cum-therapist, Dr Montag. In her essay, Sontag traced an intricate relationship
between sexuality and gender that she saw being staged in camp. Notoriously, she loosened the
relationship between camp and male homosexuality, claiming that “if homosexuals hadn’t more
or less invented Camp, someone else would.”
14
But this did not mean that sexual desire was
totally absent from her definition of camp. Rather, it manifested as an attraction towards
“androgyny”: “Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined
form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in

13
Gore Vidal, “On Pornography,” The New York Review of Books (31 March 1966),
http://www.nybooks.com.libproxy1.usc.edu/articles/1966/03/31/on-pornography/, n.p.
14
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 291. For an important early
challenge to Sontag’s formulation of camp, see Jack Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility” reprinted in Camp
Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 19–38.
For a wider critique of Sontag’s relationship to homosexuality, see D. A. Miller, “Sontag’s Urbanity,” October 49
(Summer 1989): 91–101. Guy Davidson, however, argues that “in the 1960s Sontag was generally understood as a
defender of camp and therefore of homosexuals.” (Davidson [2019], 106).
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going against the grain of one’s sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine;
what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine” (Sontag, 279). In this
formulation, camp continues to operate through an association with sexual deviancy, as this
manifests as a pull towards androgyny. In a realm of beauty, sexual attractiveness, and sexual
pleasure, camp’s transgressive relationship to homosexuality was laundered into popular
palatability by Sontag through a risqué yet “refined” appreciation of androgyny.
Sontag tied this “Camp taste for the androgynous” to “something that seems quite
different but isn’t: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality
mannerisms” (279). This exaggeration is not only seen in the “he-man-ness” of movie stars like
Victor Mature, but also in the “corny flamboyant femaleness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina
Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia Mayo” (279). Over the course of this passage, Sontag
locates sexual desire in androgyny, and then links this androgyny, via a claim that it “seems quite
different,” to a heightening of gender norms – the “flamboyance” of femininity and masculinity.
In this reading of camp, gender norms, when exaggerated, harbor their own androgyny.
Conversely, in her description of androgyny, Sontag still associates “virility” with men, even as
male beauty might lie in its refined drop of femininity. In both iterations of camp appeal, the
fixed quality of gender norms intermingles with the fluidity of an androgynous gender crossing.
If the sexual power of women, as displayed in stars like Mansfield, emerges in an exaggerated
performance of femininity, this is because her claim to sexual power echoes masculine virility
within her performance. Myra Breckinridge takes this androgyny further. As a camp object,
Myra’s exaggerated femininity – her “corny flamboyant femaleness” – unwittingly showcases
her masculine “virility.” Camp’s androgyny is literalized by Vidal in his representation of
Myra’s transsexuality.
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In an interview with Nora Ephron in 1967, Sontag explained how she had written “Notes
on Camp” in order to “rescue the word from a clique use” (quoted in Davidson [2019], 111).
Sontag implies that this “clique” model of camp was attached to male homosexuality, which in
her definition of this version of camp is characterized as “something of a private code, a badge of
identity even, among small urban cliques” (Sontag, 275). But Sontag admits that her critical
“rescue” of camp from the clique had unforeseen consequences. The publication of her essay,
she laments in the same interview with Ephron, opened a pandora’s box; camp “broadened to a
public use more vulgar than before” (Davidson [2019], 111). Sontag sets a clique version of
camp against a public version that was even more “vulgar,” revealing her mixed feelings towards
the former manifestation of this sensibility. While Sontag experienced a critical impulse to
rescue camp from a queer clique usage, in hindsight she recognizes that at least the coterie kept
its vulgarities a secret, contained within the exclusivity of its social perimeter.
Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge also trod an ambiguous line in its attitude towards these
different iterations of camp. In the bawdy sexual activity of its plot and its broad popular appeal,
it exemplifies a version of camp in its “vulgar” public usage. But threaded through the novel is a
series of references that show a clique usage of camp that communicates in a private language to
Vidal’s personal network of friends and acquaintances. As Davidson notes, the novel’s
dedication to Christopher Isherwood – who Sontag had taken to task for a “lazy” portrait of camp
in his 1954 novel The World in the Evening (Sontag, 275) – is one of these coterie
communications. The Montag/Sontag joke is another. The references to Parker Tyler function in
a similar vein. Reviewers who picked up on these “appeal[s] to an in-group” (Davidson [2019],
141) were quick to hint at the homosexual character of the literary community that Vidal was
addressing. As much as these references communicated to the private social world that Vidal
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inhabited, they also had the potential to “out” his own sexuality to a popular audience because
the queer sexuality of these subjects was easily detectable. However, when it came to Tyler at the
very least, Vidal’s tribute resolves this tension even as it threatens to expose his sexual identity.
This is because the references to Tyler not only function as “clique” camp; they also make sense
within the “public,” vulgar version of camp that the novel displays through its main character.
Tyler, whose representation in the novel is tied intimately to Myra’s personality, works as one of
the “in-jokes” for a “specialist” audience who were already acquainted with his film criticism,
but he was also a part of the punchline of Myra’s character that was played out for a popular
audience because his claims about the movies are so over the top that he borders on fictionality.
Vidal’s use of Tyler thus blurs the distinction between camp as a private communication within
exclusive queer communities – one that, when traced by critical reviewers, left Vidal open to
public scrutiny about his sexual identity – and a popular version that left Tyler exposed to public
ridicule through Vidal’s emphasis on the grotesque fantasy of Myra’s gender.
The public version of camp in Myra Breckinridge is what Michael Trask calls “mean
camp.”
15
Trask argues that mean camp harbors a cynical attitude that disrupts the transformative
potential within camp relations and turns the subject into an object of derision; the “chief target”
of mean camp is “the camp sensibility itself” (Trask, 173). The version of camp that Tyler
displayed in his film criticism, written from his position within a clique, is representative of the
camp sensibility that becomes Vidal’s target, as he ties it to the “contemptible inconsistency” of
Myra’s gender performance (173). As a “camp diva in the passé mode,” Myra’s over-valuation
of Tyler’s criticism is indicative of how she is a “throwback to an earlier camp dispensation”
(177). Through his use of Tyler in relation to Myra, Vidal incorporates the clique-coded version

15
Michael Trask, Camp Sites: Sex, Politics and Academic Style in Postwar America (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2013), 172-80.
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of camp into the same deluded fantasy as Myra’s gender performance. Myra’s tribute to Tyler
attaches the critic to her. For the public, Tyler’s criticism – if it wasn’t assumed to be a fictional
caricature of intellectual pretension – is a mirror of the fallibilities of its primary champion;
Myra overpowers the film critic’s intellectual agency through the lack of self-awareness she
displays in her devoted quoting of him.
We see how Tyler gets subsumed by the camp of Myra in the final chapter of the novel,
when Vidal makes one last veiled swipe at him. This final chapter, in contrast to the rest of the
first-person narrative, is written in the voice of Myron, as he summarizes the years since Myra
involuntarily detransitioned. Myron distances himself from “the person who wrote these
demented pages” and emphasizes the conventionality of his existence with his wife, Mary-Ann
(Vidal [1987], 211). There is no overt reference to Tyler, but Myron’s concluding paragraph
implies one indirect shift away from Myra’s reverence for this film critic: “I don’t suppose it’s
giving away any secrets to say that like so many would-be intellectuals back East Myra never
actually read books, only books about books” (213). The sentence is indicative of Myron’s
humdrum mentality, a banal anti-intellectual cliché uttered by the neutered dullard who Myra has
become. But, in the all-encompassing cynicism of his “mean camp,” Vidal – unlike Myra – gets
to have it both ways. The comment reflects a disdain, both for East Coast intellectuals in general
and the only one of them mentioned repeatedly in particular. Vidal implicitly attacks the position
of Tyler within this intellectual cottage industry, churning out “books about books” (and –
perhaps even more suspect for Myron – books about films) without ever reading the source
material of their work. Unlike the pornographers who had at last squared sex into some kind of
“realistic” reflection of sexual desire, these East Coast intellectuals operate on a plane of pure
fantasy, detached even from the texts on which they claim expertise. The unnamed Tyler,
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alongside the artistic coterie he represents, is accused by Myron of engaging in a version of
intellectual fantasy that undercuts any claim to artistic status.
This final passage points to the negative way in which Vidal resolves his book’s use of
Tyler, and cliques in general: through the effacing work of forgetting. The time for “giving away
any secrets” is over, just as the operating secrecy of a clique version of camp has been surpassed
by the public form of Vidal’s novel, in all its vulgarities. Vidal echoes Tyler’s critical efforts in
the way that his narrative orbits around the revelation of a “secret.” But Myra’s transsexuality
was already made “obvious” to the public through the gender discrepancy between her feminine
appearance and her masculine behavior, and this discrepancy was the extended joke of Vidal’s
novel. A clique camp of private codes and hidden languages was airbrushed out of the novel’s
ending; Tyler – no longer required in the plot – sinks back into the identity of unnamed “East
Coast intellectual,” a category of people that Myron evokes only to dismiss. But forgetting is not
a fixed resolution to the unstable relationship that Vidal courts with clique camp in this novel, no
matter how he much he frames Myra’s gender status, and Tyler’s role within it, as an object of
ridicule. In the next section, I turn to consider how these instabilities play out in Tyler’s
biography of Tchelitchew, which, contained within the social realm of the clique, remains
undisturbed by popular attention.

Parker Tyler, Pavel Tchelitchew: exhaustion, disappointment, and clique relations

Tyler’s diminishment in Myra Breckinridge is reflective of his artistic position in the nineteen-
sixties – or, at least, how he described it in The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew. Tyler gives
the reader a glimpse into his personal difficulties writing the biography in the opening chapter of
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the book. He begins his narrative at a 1964 retrospective of Tchelitchew’s work at the Gallery of
Modern Art in New York City, on a “night of fever, glitter and art fog” (Tyler [1969], 6). There,
Tyler, who has been at work on the biography for over four years, is seeking to avoid awkward
interactions with influential patrons of his project, who had all been expecting more immediate
return for their backing. Lincoln Kirstein, the art benefactor and co-founder of the New York
City Ballet, was chief among them: “Of course I had expected an encounter with the man who
had been personally instrumental in promoting the existence of the present biography, but with
whom at that moment I had somewhat unstable relations of amity” (4). The effect of Tyler’s
euphemistic nod to his tensions with Kirstein immediately situates the reader within the gossip of
his art world, and his own lowly position within this community. Tyler’s biography offers an
extended analysis of how negative feelings like disappointment structure the social relations of
the coterie, and how they shape the character of Tchelitchew in particular. These feelings emerge
through Tchelitchew’s deep investment in his social network; this audience of immediate peers
provides the painter with his greatest artistic acclaim. At the exhibition, Tyler labels this devoted
following “Tchelitchevians,” a “coterie full of undiminished faith” who were bound together
through their personal acquaintance with the artist (4). Facing these Tchelitchevians all in one
place was, Tyler tells his reader, fraught with the possibility of personal rebuke, for he was well-
aware that the slow pace of his writing frustrated these enthusiasts. As a social occasion, this
exhibition threatened to serve as a latent judgment of Tyler by his friends, casting him as a
malingering author who was unable to pay adequate tribute to his subject.
The slow progress of Tyler’s writing was the result of an “enigmatic and fluctuating
illness” that he had been suffering from since 1960, which left him in “revolving states of semi-
exhaustion and semi-fright” (10). This illness, referenced so early in his narrative, underpins the
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reader’s engagement with The Divine Comedy. It is made clear to us that writing the book was a
prolonged act of attrition, exacerbated by a series of misfortunes that befell Tyler. The most
significant of these was a fire that devastated his apartment in the first days of 1964; by the time
the Tchelitchew exhibition rolled around later that year, Tyler remained “in a state of hangover”
(7). This was in spite of the fact that, while his apartment was severely damaged, “virtually 95
per cent of my Tchelitchevania was saved” (7). A reason to be grateful, surely, but one that Tyler
seems to have felt uncertain about. The fire “had come as a shocking anti-climax to the physical
distemper that had put me out of working commission for more than half the man-hours of the
four years I had already devoted to this book” (7–8). Why does Tyler describe this accident as an
“anti-climax” to his ill-health, rather than as a culminating moment of his suffering? Even this
dramatic moment in Tyler’s personal life is viewed as underwhelming (perhaps this sense of
anti-climax is exactly what made it “shocking”). Because Tyler’s materials on Tchelitchew were
by and large saved, the importance of the fire is subordinated to the primacy of this critical
project. Only if the “Tchelitchevania” had been destroyed alongside Tyler’s home would the
accident have constituted a worthy climactic moment to the biography’s narrative.
As if to put the loss of his apartment into perspective, Tyler immediately compares it to a
different blaze, one that involved another close shave. In April 1958, after Tchelitchew’s death,
there was a fire at the Museum of Modern Art that almost destroyed the painter’s only
recognized masterpiece, Hide-and-Seek (1940–42). This painting had been one of the museum’s
most popular with midcentury audiences and its destruction would have dramatically reduced the
value of Tchelitchew’s oeuvre available for posterity. But – as happened later with Tyler’s
Tchelitchevania – the painting was spared from the flames, with only the surface of its oil paint
lightly “cooked” (8). In spite of this escape, Tyler claims that it would have been “easy for an
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intimate friend of the artist” to anticipate Tchelitchew’s reaction: “one can hear Tchelitchew
flare up with correspondingly sudden flame” (9). This projected reaction relativizes Tyler’s own
misery: “[i]magining him in the fury which I used to observe, I felt how feeble was any pretense
of mine, however conscientious, that my own troubles could be traced to a hyper-sensitivity, a
paranoia, so sublime as his. The thought made me humble” (9). There is something quite
endearing about the way Tyler orients his private troubles around the grandeur he ascribes to
Tchelitchew in fantasy. Tchelitchew’s imagined anguish over the MoMA fire has a sublimity
that Tyler, however much he was suffering about his apartment, could not access in the hardship
he actually experienced.
This is even as Tyler’s own paranoia seems to do a reasonable job of matching
Tchelitchew’s. He claims that the material damage to his apartment was not as harmful to him as
a “superstitious thought that began insidiously to plague me” (10): namely, what if the fire was
an act of judgment on Tyler for the slow progress of his biography-writing? In his narrative,
Tyler converses with Tchelitchew’s “ghost,” trying to offer justifications for his slow progress:
“these tactics came to little in dealing, even imaginarily, with a superstitious positivist of
Tchelitchew’s calibre” (10). At every turn in his paranoia and superstitions, Tyler sees himself as
coming up short compared to the painter and his ghostly spirit. Indeed, given the “sudden flame”
of Tchelitchew’s fiery spirit, the reader might suspect the later blaze served, in the superstitious
mind of the critic, as a manifestation of the painter’s personal judgment of his biography’s slow
progress.
In this episode of parallel – even competing – fires, Tyler establishes a power dynamic
with his subject that is skewed to favor the latter. Tyler recounts the cost that this biography has
exacted upon him as a result. He has sunk “[a]ll the vitality I possessed” into his work (10). In
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this cycle of exhaustion, the biography demands a level of energy expenditure that frustrates
Tyler’s desires to complete his book. This drained feeling pervades the narrative, working as a
reflection not only of Tyler’s state of mind, but of his subject too. During his life, Tchelitchew,
like Tyler as he wrote his biography, experienced a series of illnesses that were simultaneously
physical and psychological. There are several reasons for the painter’s visceral deterioration: a
painful diarrhea that he contracted in Dubrovnik in 1938; a tape worm that sapped his power
during his final years. But Tyler suggests that just as pernicious as the physical and mental
ailments was the painter’s social networking, which often occurred in correlation with his bodily
discomforts. Tchelitchew plays a “lifelong game of drawing people out, tricking them into
possible self-betrayals, intimacies of confidence” (259), but Tyler emphasizes that these
intimacies had an impact: “charming people creates a noticeable wear-and-tear” in the painter
(349). One of the primary tensions in the biography’s portrait of Tchelitchew is this subject’s
persistence in playing a “lifelong game” that physically and psychically chafes him, to the extent
that it causes permanent harm. Tchelitchew’s negative experiences of a certain kind of social
relation to which he yet remains committed is the major affective state that structures Tyler’s
narrative, simultaneously subsuming and reflecting the woes of his biographer.
It is the manner with which Tchelitchew plays his “game” of socializing that Tyler finds
grueling. For all the ways in which the painter’s emotional range has a sublime grandeur that
cannot be matched by his biographer, Tyler also makes it seem pretty tiring to be as sensitive as
Tchelitchew. As the painter lay dying in his hospital room in Italy, for instance, “he kept track of
those who wrote and those who didn’t; exactly what each one said was carefully weighed” (87).
Even when facing death, Tchelitchew was preoccupied by the exact degree of the snubs he might
be receiving. He shared this mentality with Ford, who ranked the condolences he was sent after
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his partner’s death, giving them “marks for genuineness and depth as if they had been term
papers” (73). The meticulousness with which Tchelitchew and Ford groused about their friends
was, for Tyler, a reflection of a set of insecurities orbiting around their artistic status.
Tchelitchew’s “fatal character” was that he measured artistic fame “with the ruler of a press
agent and the agile eye of a bank teller” (60). As hamartia go, it’s not the most glamorous one.
The “fatal” quality of this trait was that it reduced Tchelitchew – and Ford – to the professional
classes. The prosaic occupations of press agent, bank teller, and schoolmaster do not correspond
to the exalted ambition of the painter’s artworks.
Tyler emphasizes his divergence from the attitude of social bean-counting that
characterized Tchelitchew and Ford’s aggressive pursuit of recognition. Tyler claims that he
never felt comfortable with the “stupid conventionalities” of the artistic salon, with its forced
niceties, while “my two friends regard my moral rebellion in this field as a provincial tic” (425).
The imprint of their snobbery lingers within the narrative, but Tyler reverses the social judgment
passed by Tchelitchew and Ford so that it becomes an implicit judgment upon this pair and their
social climbing. In his private correspondence, Tyler was more critical of Tchelitchew’s
networking. Tchelitchew, Tyler complained to Boultenhouse, was intent on becoming “an
INTERNATIONAL PERSONALITY. Now hard at work organizing an art clique. Eligible:
Anybody who is somebody. You can hear the wheels going around in him.”
16
In this letter Tyler
accentuates the desperation of his “hard work” through the over-emphatic capitalization of
“INTERNATIONAL PERSONALITY.” It is an ambition clunking around so loudly that Tyler
can “hear” the painter plotting his next move. Tchelitchew might aspire to go global, but this is
as a “personality” rather than as an artist. In Tyler’s read of his friend, he identifies a mindset of

16
To Charles Boultenhouse, undated, in the Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, 1927–1994, New York
Public Library, Box 1.
187
snobbish exclusivity that is so desperate it lacks the capacity for discernment: “anybody who is
somebody” is eligible for entry into this clique. The form of the clique is more valuable, as a way
to secure an “international” reputation, than the subjects who might inhabit this exclusive
community. Tyler’s own attitude, he insisted, was different: “Nothing, but nothing, matters
socially to me except individuals,” he wrote to Boultenhouse, “Not nation, nor city, nor class, nor
clique.”
17

But while Tyler is critical of this trait in his friend, The Divine Comedy re-evaluates these
desires, rendering them inextricable from a recognition of his revered friend’s creative talent.
While he might snipe at Tchelitchew for the way he considers himself an “international
personality,” in his biography Tyler informs the reader that the painter’s “own country, after all,
is Genius. Of course, it is not on the map unless your name is on the map” (Tyler [1969], 355).
Here, Tchelitchew’s “international personality” morphs into its own country, but one that
transcends national borders. Instead, it appears on the map exclusively for those who are
themselves “genius.” In the tautology that Tyler articulates, you can recognize genius only if you
already possess it. Like a Studio 54 doorman, this clique mindset refuses entry to those unaware
of what club night they’re queuing for. Tchelitchew himself is the barometer upon which
“genius” is judged. Only if you perceive him as one might you be worthy of being understood as
a creative visionary yourself.
This is how Tyler reconciles Tchelitchew’s clique ambitions with the exaggerated value
he places on the painter as an “individual.” While he might critique his social appetite, Tyler
understands that Tchelitchew’s greatness is based on the magnitude of his character: “Nothing is
mere about Tchelitchew” (21). The force of his personality covers his extreme sensitivity to

17
To Charles Boultenhouse, 27 April 1954, in the Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, 1927–1994, New
York Public Library, Box 1.
188
social slights: “hence his biography should not resemble other biographies but proceed with
those devious and melodramatic movements that governed his art and his life, his mind and
especially his body” (21). Tchelitchew’s machinations were interconnected with his creativity, as
well as his physical and mental health. But Tyler’s attempt to reconcile Tchelitchew’s “devious
and melodramatic movements” with his oversized creative genius is strained at times by Tyler’s
over-egged personal aversion to the clique, one that is distorted by his own uncomfortable,
unwilling position as a coterie artist who struggles to receive recognition even from his peers.
This bind might explain why, although Tyler claims this social sensitivity as a part of
Tchelitchew’s greatness, he also represents these cliquish tendencies as at the root of the psychic
harm that contributes to Tchelitchew’s physical disintegration. Tyler depicts an implicit conflict
between these two strands of Tchelitchew’s personality, one that reaches no secure resolution.
The painter’s social preoccupations grind him down physically, redirecting his attention away
from his creative endeavors and towards a need for peer-appreciation; and as Tchelitchew senses
his career faltering, his concern for the coterie curdles into the suspicion that he is being
neglected by his friends.
These social preoccupations don’t only inflict damage on Tchelitchew in his personal
life. They also chip away at the reader’s idea of Tchelitchew and his artistic value. Tyler’s
exposure of the painter’s social penny-pinching is an unflattering characterization of his friend,
because the reader comes away with an impression of the artist’s pettiness that is difficult to fully
reconcile with a conception of him as a creative genius, even as Tyler portrays Tchelitchew as
the latter. In this character portrait, it feels like Tyler ignored Edith Sitwell’s warning against
telling too much about his subject. Through the revelations of Tchelitchew’s petty, private
character, Tyler has, contra Sitwell’s advice, exposed him to the judgment of others. And this
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isn’t the extent of Tyler’s indiscretions in his biography. “Don’t hand him over to the wolves,”
Sitwell warned Tyler; his indirect response to her, late in the narrative, is to recall the time when
Tchelitchew gave Sitwell a public dressing-down, in “a scene of intentional humiliation” (464).
Tyler’s recollection of this encounter is its own public re-iteration of the humiliation, and a
personal counter to Sitwell’s warning. If Tyler is handing Tchelitchew “over to the wolves,” then
other participants within this coterie will be publicly devoured too.
So, as much as Tchelitchew is the singular individual of the text, Tyler explores the
tensions of an entire art world community through him. Even as Tyler might claim privately that
“the clique” – alongside other collective ways of organizing subjects – does not “matter” to him,
in his biography there is no way for any individual to escape the mark of this exclusive, insular
social formation in their relations with one another. No one is above the fray; even Tyler is there
at the Tchelitchew exhibition, in spite of the personal qualms he claims to have about
hobnobbing within this community. This is the critical problem Tyler presents about the “clique”
in his tribute to Tchelitchew. He treats it with an underlying hostility because of the ways in
which it hollowed out Tchelitchew’s physical and mental capacity for creative production, but he
also seeks to vindicate the painter’s investment in the clique because this kind of social network
is where Tchelitchew derived the majority of his critical attention, and where Tyler garnered any
acclaim of his own. Tyler balances these two traits by recognizing Tchelitchew as a particular
“type” of individual, one who possesses “the paranoia of the open, vulnerable microcosm of the
individual in the modern world. And he takes it all very personally!” (246). As an individual,
Tchelitchew is an especially porous one, open and vulnerable to a paranoic intensity in his social
relations that enfolds artistic concerns into his personal battles. This porosity enables him to
encompass within his personality the intransigent cliquishness of this wider art world.
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Tyler shows the inescapability of Tchelitchew’s clique mindset through his representation
of the fractious relations that the painter cultivated with other art world figures during his career.
One example could be found in the dissolution of Tchelitchew’s friendship with Gertrude Stein.
For a short period of time in the nineteen-twenties, Stein had played the role of one of
Tchelitchew’s “sibyls,” the creative women who took the painter under their wing and provided
influential support for his career (Sitwell, who became friends with Tchelitchew as he broke with
Stein, was the other major figure who played this role). What caused this friendship’s collapse,
Tyler reveals, was a territorial dispute over how to run a domestic household. The intimacy
between the painter and the poet was based on their exchange of confidences, but these, Tyler
tells us, were often one-sided affairs: “In his all-embracing manner, Tchelitchew pours out
everything about himself to Miss Stein, not only his ideas, his worldly struggles and hopes, but
all his private affairs, his problems” (316). In his outpouring to Stein, Tchelitchew, that
particularly “open, vulnerable” type of individual, is unable to distinguish the boundary between
his private affairs and his public, “worldly” ideas. But it is Stein who ends up transgressing these
boundaries. At one point, Tchelitchew complains about his sister, Choura, and the unfashionable
clothes she wears. While maintaining a pose of even-handedness, Stein stirs the pot with Choura
by asking about the issue, because “she cannot give her verdict without consulting Choura for
her side of this and other questions” (316). This intervention riles Tchelitchew, as “his great
patroness has gone behind his back and undermined his domestic authority,” Tyler tells us: “It is
the beginning of the end” (317).
As an origin story for the collapse of a friendship, Tyler’s juicy tidbit of gossip is
intriguing because of its mundanity. It reveals these two domineering individuals as petty to the
point of banality. It also contrasts with how Stein and Alice Toklas had both previously
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described Tchelitchew’s split with Stein, which they had framed as a matter of aesthetic
disagreement. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Tchelitchew is mentioned as Stein
surveys the post-World War I art scene. She initially judges his work “interesting,” indicative of
a “new movement” in painting (Stein, 244–6). But her appreciation of “the young Russian”
wanes: his painting, she decides, lacks a “very dominating creative power” that could bring a
new art movement into being (245). That’s all Stein gives her readers about Tchelitchew. And
while this slight narrative might have been because all parties were still alive when the
Autobiography was published in 1933, Toklas echoes Stein’s truncated account of how this
relationship soured thirty years later, in her memoir, published after the death of both Stein and
Tchelitchew. “His painting interested Gertrude for a little while,” Toklas wrote of Tchelitchew,
“Until it went bad, as she said. Then his paintings were moved into the salon des refuses”
(Toklas [1963], 136). Tchelitchew’s indignity at being moved by Stein into a room full of rejects
is framed by the pair as merely an aesthetic consideration, due to a problem with the paintings
(they “went bad”) rather than a cooling of their social relations. It turns a subjective personal
dispute into a matter of objective artistic failure, which compounds the humiliation of
Tchelitchew – who would, no doubt, have preferred to have been told he was unlikeable rather
than untalented.
Tyler’s account undercuts Stein and Toklas’s framing of this episode. He understands the
fate of Tchelitchew’s paintings in the salon des refuses, where they “find an unlimited haven in
this unsociable room” (Tyler [1969], 314–5), as a fundamentally social banishment. As I
described in my previous chapter, the “atmosphere” of Stein and Toklas’s home infuses aesthetic
judgments with social motivations – and consequences. In the private space of Stein and
Toklas’s domestic household, the ramifications of an art world’s clique relations are thrashed
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out. In her correspondence, Toklas took a much more strident view of Tchelitchew. “He was
absolutely cannibal,” she wrote to one friend, “he devoured everything – men women children –
flats – furniture” (To L. Elizabeth Hansen, 14 April 1949, Burns [ed.], 154). Toklas understood
Tchelitchew’s committed social networking as so destructive to the private/public divide that he
threatened the domestic equilibrium of her prized household (“flats” and “furniture” were both
capable of being devoured by Tchelitchew, alongside people). At its most fundamental level, the
problem with Tchelitchew for Toklas was that his behavior lacked discretion; his insatiable
appetite for networking exposed this mode of relation as the skeletal shape of their shared artistic
community. Toklas, by contrast, was making her complaints about his character in the discreet
channels of her private correspondence.
But by the time of Tyler’s biography Toklas was willing to be less discreet. While she
was fairly benign in her own memoir, she gave a blunter appraisal of Tchelitchew in her remarks
to Tyler that showed off her social snobbery: “Pavlik was a dreadful little arriviste” (Tyler
[1969], 347). In his desperation to get ahead he went “armed to the teeth” (318). There might
have been reasons for Toklas opening up to Tyler like this. She became increasingly candid in
her old age, and she herself died the same year that Tyler’s biography was first published – the
social consequences of indiscretion mattered less to her at this point in her life.
18
Also, it wasn’t
her book; she had less responsibility for what she uttered to Tyler, compared to what was
published under her own name. Regardless, Toklas’s willingness to air some of this dirty laundry
– something that she had guarded against in her own publications throughout her lifetime, in
spite of her love of gossip – is indicative of the attitude towards personal revelations that Tyler’s
biography solicited. I argued in my previous chapter that Toklas’s works performed a set of

18
Leon Katz took advantage of Toklas’s later-life openness (see Katz). For more on the controversy of Katz’s
scholarship, see Malcolm.
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evasions about the couple in order to distance Stein from an association with a lesbian sexuality.
The flat tone of her narratives about the coming and goings of the couple’s social life was how
she represented the personal in her texts, rather than allowing the reader to access the
psychological intimacy of the couple’s private life. As its own kind of coterie text, Tyler’s
biography functions quite differently. Whereas no interior psyche is represented in the social
world sketched out by Stein and Toklas, Tchelitchew’s relations are always reflective of his
internal turmoil, his interactions “saturated with psychic nervosity” (433). The maneuverings of
his social existence perform an expressive function in relation to the painter’s psyche. But they
were also reflective of how a clique mindset structured the wider art world. In my next section, I
explore this representation of the clique with regards to Tyler’s reading of Tchelitchew’s artistic
output, and how this relates to the painter’s sexual relationship with Ford. In the interactions
between these two major tenets in Tchelitchew’s life – his paintings and his sexual relations – we
see once again how Tyler is unable to disaggregate the clique from the context of Tchelitchew’s
creative vision, and the trouble that this attachment stirs up when faced with the twinned matters
of sex and aesthetics.

Tyler, Tchelitchew, Charles Henri Ford: secrets and indiscretions of the Lion Man

My argument thus far has claimed Tyler’s biography as a coterie text, to the extent that it
exposed his subject’s cultivation and navigation of the clique. Tchelitchew had a deep
attachment to this model of social relations, and Tyler replicated the gossipy tones of the clique
within his biography as a part of his tribute to the painter. But through other strands of his
homage Tyler also expresses a desire to supersede these clique relations, revealing how
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Tchelitchew transcends the trivial grievances of his social sphere. Tyler does this by way of an
analysis of Tchelitchew’s paintings. In these readings – in particular the wall-sized painting
Phenomena, which is the focus of this section – he confronts a tension between the social
relations depicted in Tchelitchew’s artworks and his own critical desire to uncover a deeper
meaning within them. In his treatment of Phenomena Tyler examines Tchelitchew’s paintings
through the lens of the clique, acknowledging how the artist’s emotional investment in this social
realm shapes the vision of his artworks. But Tyler is also adamant that an attention to the clique
– and the granular pettinesses that structure these relations – should not distract from the
planetary scale in which Tchelitchew’s artworks orbit. His paintings surpass the clique as they
possess a “cosmic dimension as a vast system of prodigious and dizzying extents” (13). These
cosmic proportions, Tyler argues, load these paintings with a series of hidden meanings, secrets
that are only accessible through a critical decoding of the painting’s symbols that lie beyond the
intense localism of Tchelitchew’s clique relations.
However, through an analysis of the biography’s representation of Phenomena, I argue
that the symbolic reading of Tchelitchew’s aesthetic practice remains tethered to the coterie in
spite of Tyler’s critical ambitions to detach them. I do this by considering Tyler’s focus on
Tchelitchew’s sex life and the role it plays in his paintings. Tyler understands Tchelitchew’s
sexual impulses as a central motivating force in his artistic production. In Hide-and-Seek, for
instance, he claims that “the catalyst, the activating element, is exactly and solely sex as the
creative principle” (165). Sex is a source of inspiration that makes Tchelitchew an artistic
genius; his libido is enfolded into the hidden meanings of his artworks. But Tyler notes that
Tchelitchew is also wary of his sexual appetite: “much of his worldliest self was sunk in an
unreachable domain at the bottom of his ‘house of earth’ [...] Coiled in him was the power of
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pythons, and in spite of his frank sensuality, this could abash and frighten him” (76). Sex is both
bestial and transcendent, for Tchelitchew. It lurks, a coiled spring, at the bottom of his nature,
but it has the force to propel his creativity to the “prodigious and dizzying extents” of cosmic
invention. This “double or crossbred nature” that lies within Tchelitchew (146) is the dialectic of
sex that animates his artistry, where a “worldly” version of sex is opposed to, and yet intertwined
with, a quasi-mystical formulation.
The double nature of sex in Tchelitchew’s life and art is complicated further when the
painter’s libidinal urges are read in light of his relationship with Charles Henri Ford. My chapter
on Ford has already shown how complicated their relationship could be. Tyler’s description of it
does not dwell on Ford’s – or Tchelitchew’s – pederasty, although he does make their
homosexuality clear to the reader. Instead, the defining features of Tyler’s portrayal of their
relationship resembles his portrait of clique relations elsewhere in the biography, which are
marked by the humdrum negative affects of intimacy. Tchelitchew and Ford, he writes, “never
cease trading professional pecks,” which forms one “aspect of their domestic warfare” (486).
This career competitiveness is subordinated to a sexual friction within their coupledom. Towards
the end of his life, Tyler tells us, Tchelitchew begrudgingly permitted his partner to practice
painting, and would drop by Ford’s room to see what – or rather, who – Ford was working on:
“Here he was, the great artist, on the prowl again and eavesdropping! Was he interested in
whether he [Ford] was at work? More likely, he was concerned over whom he might be seducing
at that moment, and of course hoping there would be someone…” (67–8). Tyler pictures the
scene of the jealous painter, using a purported interest in Ford’s artistic development as a means
to scrutinize his partner’s sexual activity. In this scene, Ford’s sexual activity is something that
Tchelitchew is ambivalent about, both angered and enticed. Elsewhere in the biography,
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Tchelitchew is shown to rebuke Ford for his “sexual indiscretions” (39), but in this episode it is
the painter who is seeking out Ford’s encounters, and to what end Tyler leaves unclear. The
ambiguities of these sorts of revelations bolster an impression of the biography as an extended
form of gossip – and, in this case, sexual gossip.
We see Tyler working through some of these uncertainties in his analysis of Phenomena,
the earliest of the three paintings he uses to organize the sections of his biography. From a
“worldly perspective,” Tyler explains, Hide-and-Seek was Tchelitchew’s recognized “success
masterpiece” and Phenomena was his “failure masterpiece” (56). It is not hard to see why this
painting was deemed a failure by his peers, one that left Tchelitchew and Ford having to traverse
a series of “casual embarrassments” in its wake (409). Phenomena, Tyler explains, is “a portrait
of the artist’s dynamic relations with society” (120); it is also his portrait of Hell. It is therefore
quite a loaded capturing of Tchelitchew’s society and his place in it, offering the painter’s
“judgment of the world, specifically of its human society” as a “Dionysian orgy with a flavor of
sour grapes” (199). This judgment was a product of its time, the result of the bloody violence of
the nineteen-thirties and the global conflict to which it was building at the end of the decade.
19

But it was also a caustic portrait of the painter’s friendship circle. The painting is composed of
numerous art world figures from Tchelitchew’s social network, who sprawl across an arid
setting, each appearing in a freakish visual form. These figures included friend and foe alike. The
painter Christian “Bebè” Bérard, whom Tchelitchew viewed as his rival, appears as the Bearded
Lady, while his favored “Sibyl” Edith Sitwell is the Sequestered One, floating behind a self-
portrait of Tchelitchew. Stein and Toklas are cast to the back of the painting as the Sitting Bull

19
Phenomena was, Tchelitchew claimed in a letter to Lincoln Kirstein, “the mildest lamb, compared to the époque
which we have to witness … We are living in midst of the most appalling and impossible not to be seen horrors and
madness – and everyone cover them with pretty rugs and wallpaper and chintz…!” Quoted in Angela Miller,
“‘Vibrant Matter’: The Countermodern World of Pavel Tchelitchew,” The Art Bulletin 102, no.2 (May 2020): 140.
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and the Knitting Maniac, in front of a howling caped figure. Even Tyler makes the cut, appearing
as the Armless Wonder who types away with his feet. This coagulating mass of figures lack any
coherent sense of proportion or scale. Different body parts are magnified, fluctuating between
these individuals without any obvious pattern. They are bathed in a washed-out rainbow color
scheme, as if Tchelitchew’s real-life acquaintances have been refracted through a prismatic lens
that exposes their true nature as a web of languorous, listless freaks.
As a “judgment” of Tchelitchew’s clique world, Phenomena reveals the painter’s
committed participation within his social network. Tyler understands this painting as “an ‘in’
game” that Tchelitchew plays “on exclusive territory” (393). Better, for these figures, to appear
in the painting as a freak than not appear at all. To caricature figures like Stein and Toklas might
have been read as an act of vengeance on the part of Tchelitchew, but it also acknowledges their
significance within his social sphere – in its own way a less painful commemoration than the
disinterested dismissal of him that Stein and Toklas performed in their memoirs. Thus,
Phenomena feels stuck in a circular relation to Tchelitchew’s friendship network, one that
negotiates hostile feelings towards its represented figures with a begrudging recognition of their
importance by his inclusion of them in his vision of Hell. This attitude generates a self-
perpetuating exclusivity, where the painting is laced with a special significance for this audience
of Tchelitchew’s peers, even as they lie condemned within its social judgment.

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Figure 4: Pavel Tchelitchew, Phenomena (1936–38), 72 x 96 in.

Tyler recognizes the immediate social plane on which Phenomena operates, but he also
attempts to recuperate another form of meaning out of this impasse. This symbolic reading is one
that extends beyond the stagnant art world relations that Tchelitchew portrays. But before he
takes the reader “behind the veil” of the painting’s meaning (397), Tyler first of all anticipates
his argument’s reception: “I know there will be, along with pursed lips, some outcries: ‘But you
can’t say there is no malice in the caricatures of Stein and Toklas as stubby character dolls of
ambiguous charm, stationed at the threshold of a dumping ground!’” (391). Tyler seems to relish
these provincial judgments that he anticipates emanating from the social realm, past which his art
criticism is seeking to transcend. Tyler’s response to this charge argues that to perceive only the
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personal “malice” in such caricatures is to stay on the surface of the painting, blind to the
“hermetic aura” of the painting itself (391). As in his reading of Hollywood films, Tyler claims a
mythic quality to these figures; the image of Stein and Toklas, for example, grants them “an
archaic terseness” that takes them beyond pure caricature (391). This is Tyler’s attempt to create
hermeneutic depth beyond the painting’s social meaning, signaling him as out-of-step with
Warhol’s aesthetics of pure surface that I discussed in my third chapter, which was in the
ascendancy in New York’s art world by the time The Divine Comedy was published in 1967.
20

Tyler’s critical faith in traditional aesthetic categories were apparent when he urges his reader to
reduce their focus on the intimate ties of Tchelitchew’s social relations as an explanation for
Phenomena. To do so is to miss the “mystery” of the painting: “therefore look beyond
appearance” (391).
In order to get “beyond appearance” Tyler instructs the viewer to move away from the
surface particulars of each individual caricature and try to understand the painting as an organic
whole: “it is by looking at the total organization of Phenomena, its rhythms and composition, by
apprehending its deep content and focusing on its true symbolism, that one avoids the
unpardonable error of reading it shallowly” (392–3). What is most notable here is the
exaggerated intensity of Tyler’s insistence. The error of a shallow interpretation of the painting
as a representation of Tchelitchew’s social network is “unpardonable,” even though Tyler
previously acknowledged this reading in his own discussion of Phenomena. By this point in his
analysis, the immediate relation between his painting’s caricatures and the real-life individuals of
his community do not count as the “true symbolism” of the work. Tchelitchew’s art world
society is symptomatic of the “shallow” reading of the painting. The problem, he claims, is that

20
It was also in contrast to Ford, who had embraced Warhol and Pop Art in the early nineteen-sixties. For more on
Ford’s relationship with Warhol and Pop Art, see Howard, 145–88.
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reading the painting as a “hidden language of symbols” garners little interest for a gossip-
mongering audience: “there is always little hope that the modern art public will be impressed by
what normally it could regard as extraneous jargon” (398–9). The kind of exposition that Tyler
puts forward, even though it is cloaked in a language of secrecy, does not titillate a “modern art
public,” who want secrets wrapped in the form of social gossip about sexual indiscretions. Tyler
is well-aware that to give away secrets that are not social revelations is to run the risk of being
judged from within that realm: “discussing fashionable art in terms of arcane symbol and
allegory is more than indiscreet, being apt to get one branded as a crashing bore” (392).
To be honest, Tyler’s symbolic reading of Phenomena does fray the edges of a reader’s
attention, tempting them to glaze over. There is an opacity in his argument that piles obscurity
onto the painting, even as he performs an apparent exegesis of it. In order to push against the
“shallow” relationship between Tchelitchew’s painting and his social world, Tyler depicts
Phenomena as a symbolic mystery with the “features of an Hermetic Cosmos” (402), a version
that accentuates the painting’s interpretative impenetrability. Tyler argues that Phenomena needs
to be understood in concert with Tchelitchew’s other paintings. When looked at collectively they
function within a “Pythagorean tradition” of “mystic initiation” that involves three stages:
“Epiphany,” “Autopsy,” and “Theophany” (399). This sequence, Tyler states, follows a
trajectory towards “ultimate enlightenment” (401): epiphany is the onset of an initiation into this
enlightenment; autopsy is the experience of that enlightening; and theophany is the state of being
enlightened. Tchelitchew’s journey of artistic creation is a movement that reaches “total
revelation” (399); a revelation that goes beyond the quotidian nature of social gossip, and into a
communion with a Hermetic “godhead” (401). Phenomena, Tyler claims, possesses these three
stages of enlightenment within it “as purely formal quantities” (400), but – corresponding to its
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position as the earliest of the three paintings Tyler analyzes – it is also representative of the first
stage of “epiphany” in its entirety. Tchelitchew’s portrait of hell is a recognition of the descent
that he is moving away from, through the spiritual stages represented by his later artworks, Hide-
and-Seek and one of his final paintings, the abstract Inachevé (1957), which depict the stages of
“autopsy” and “theophany” respectively.
Tyler’s interpretation of Tchelitchew’s paintings claims for this body of work a
grandiosity that was absent in a reading of Phenomena as solely an act of social judgment. But
disclosing the details of Tchelitchew’s sex life would seem to threaten to turn the painting back
into the kind of gossip that Tyler has sought to shift away from with his theoretical elaboration of
Phenomena’s “Pythagorean initiation.” Yet, in the shape of Ford, Tchelitchew’s sexual relations
are at the center of Tyler’s symbolic decoding of Phenomena. When Tyler talks about locating
the painting’s meaning “beyond the veil” he is in fact referring to a literal veil, one that is in the
central foreground of the image. This is a white towel, held up by the figure of the “Lion Man,”
covering the face of this particular freak. The viewer only sees a pair of disproportionately large
and hairy legs and the outline of a head behind the towel. Tyler argues that this figure is “the
cynosure of Phenomena” (407). As the primary object of the painting’s meaning, the Lion Man’s
towel is the “veil” that Tyler is seeking to get “behind.” And it is Ford, Tyler reveals, who is
hidden behind this veil, with Tyler including a photograph of Ford in the biography’s inset where
he is posed in a similar way that serves as proof of his claim. Unlike the other real-life models in
the painting, Ford’s face is not visible to the viewer of the painting; we are reliant upon Tyler’s
intimate access to this photograph to recognize who is lurking “behind” the artwork’s surface
meaning.
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Tyler’s focus upon Ford, in the figure of the Lion Man, dwells upon the problem of sex
that he presents. One of the things that is distinctive about this figure, Tyler notes, is that the
body “behind the veil” has no torso. Instead, it is compressed into just legs and a head, with a
“break at his middle”; as a result, what this body is notably lacking is a “genital region” (398).
Tyler argues that “the climactic illusion of sexual deprivation in the Lion Man” (398) represents
the relationship between the social and symbolic realms of Phenomena’s meaning: there is no
transitional force to mediate between the surface and its depths. Ford’s appearance in the
painting shows the stratification of these two distinct realms. As an artist, he is the “Lyric Poet”
who communes on the symbolic plane with Tchelitchew (402). But, covered in hair as the Lion
Man, he is the “animal demon,” the pederast we analyzed in chapter one, whose sexual activity
circulates indiscreetly within the profane social environment of this art world (402).
Sex, as simultaneously the catalyst for creative action and bestial excess, is the guiding
impulse that would enable Ford to slide up and down between these two different poles. But the
genitalia that could facilitate mediation between these two realms is missing: as the Lion Man,
Tyler claims, Ford has been castrated. As a result, in the arid landscape of Tchelitchew’s Hell,
where “sexual abstinence, sterility or taboo is symbolically plain enough” (407), there is no place
to resolve the tension between these two opposing forces. But, although detached from him,
Ford’s genitalia do make an appearance in Tyler’s analysis of the painting: “wedged into the
inverted V of the Lion Man’s straddling stance” are a skull and bones and a strange animal, part
sea lion, part polar bear (407). Tyler suggests these are both signs of Ford’s lost fleshy parts:
“they symbolize the ritually hidden, mystically eliminated, animal middle” (406–7). Just as Myra
Breckinridge’s significance as a commentary on sexuality is figured by Vidal through a male sex
organ that is present in her character, even though it is no longer on her body, Ford’s missing
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penis and testicles are invested with a symbolic meaning that stands in uncertain relation to the
painting’s surface appearance. These genitalia, which signify the sexual drive that is a disruptive
element in his relationship with Tchelitchew, are both present and absent in the painting, a
pictorial flickering that is representative of Tyler’s indeterminate attitude towards the social life
that uses these sexual impulses for trivial gossip.
The visual rupture of the towel produces a “moment of terror” where everything is left in
“aëriel suspension” (407), unrealized between the polar realms of the symbolic and the social.
The lack of resolution between these two realms is how Tyler concludes his reading “behind the
veil” of Phenomena. From the perspective of the social formation of the clique – one that
Tchelitchew, Ford, and Tyler all inhabit, even if they don’t all claim to value it – the symbolic
realm will always remain hidden: “hermetic secrets, to the profane, are ‘unknowable’” (407).
Like Toklas speculating in her cookbook about the unknown pleasures of the egg, Tyler asks
what can be revealed about the hermetic form of secrets when they remain “unknowable” to
those who are uninitiated to this symbolic plane of meaning? Unable to penetrate these symbols,
the “profane” will continue to misrecognize the painting as Tchelitchew’s gossipy commentary
on his social group. The other meaning of Phenomena remains suspended within its depths.
Conversely, though, Tyler’s attitude returns us to the “clique camp” that Sontag described – the
“private code” that only the initiated could understand (Sontag, 275). Tyler’s symbolic reading
of Phenomena aims to take us far away from the profane social realm of his art world, but it
lands us back with the same structuring dynamic of these cliquish relations.
We see this also taking place in Tyler’s central placement of Ford in Phenomena’s
system of symbolic meaning, which undercuts the distinction he makes between the social and
symbolic realms. Unlike the representation of his detached genitalia, the meaning of Ford in the
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biography – shaped by Tyler’s personal relationship with his friend – cannot be severed from the
meaning Ford possesses in the painting. We see this in how Tyler, through his privileged access
to Tchelitchew through Ford, was “a constant visitor” to their apartment when the painter was
working on Phenomena (387). But the interconnection between the aesthetic and social realms is
also shown when Tyler admits to a cooling in his relations with the pair. Their friendship grew “a
tiny bit stale” over the course of the postwar period: “I detect a new driness [sic] in the
atmosphere” (487). The dryness that creeps into their relationship at the end of the biography’s
narrative harks back to Tyler’s reading of the Lion Man in Phenomena. The painting possesses
this same atmosphere; the sterility of the Lion Man, Tyler argues, shows that “sex may be hot,
but in Hell it is also ‘dry’” (407). For all its symbolic meaning, the sexual aridity of the Lion
Man figure is echoed in the “stale” social relations between Ford, Tchelitchew, and Tyler in the
postwar period.
In this context, Tyler’s status as an intimate, even confidant, of Ford and Tchelitchew
influences his reading of the hermetic symbols in Phenomena. The focus on the Lion Man’s
absent genitalia, displaced elsewhere in the painting, possesses a significance within the context
of Tyler’s relations with Ford and Tchelitchew. As a commentary on the couple’s relationship,
Tyler’s analysis of the loss of Ford’s sex organ is hardly discreet once we consider what this
means as sexual gossip. Reaching “behind the veil” to a site of deeper meaning – one that places
him at risk of becoming a “crashing bore” – Tyler’s reading is an indiscretion through the way it
loops back to the sexual disclosures about Tchelitchew and Ford’s relationship that are also
included in the biography. Tyler does not excavate a deep meaning from Phenomena without
indirectly seeking recourse to the sexual gossip that circulates about the painter and his partner in
their art world community. To make this claim is not to refute Tyler’s interpretation of his
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friend’s painting; after all, it is predicated upon his personal awareness of Tchelitchew’s
aspirations, and so he is one of the “initiated” in terms of his knowledge of these intentions. But
it is to insist that even as Tyler makes his case for his symbolic reading of the painting, his
analysis remains saturated with the clique relations he disavows as “shallow.”
“There is a mystery beyond love, perhaps a mystery which is the special child of love,”
Tyler writes at an earlier point in the biography, about Ford and Tchelitchew’s damaged,
damaging relationship (94). Tyler’s formulation of Tchelitchew’s aesthetic value is an effort to
preserve, even create, that “mystery.” But it rests upon a quite particular version of love that
Tyler espies within the coupledom of his two friends, a love that embraces all the petty domestic
battles that structured their relationship. This mystery “would be a bastard: a divine bastard, half
habit half need, one might say, an inutile but supreme hermaphrodite” (94). Such a mystery is
bound up in the profane experience of the clique, where an investment in this exclusive social
formation molds the kind of love that can be shared between subjects. The hermetic symbols of
this mystery might not be legible when read from the shallows of this social world, but they
remain in communion with this world, even if imperceptibly so. The reality of artistic creation, at
least as Tyler reveals it in his critical indiscretions about Tchelitchew and Ford’s relationship
difficulties, does not emerge from outside of a place of intimate ties.
“An inutile but supreme hermaphrodite”: such a description calls to mind the gender
instability of Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge. In that novel, Vidal produced a set of clique references
that, when it came to Tyler’s role in the narrative, simultaneously dismissed and preserved the
status of this social formation within his text. He did this by mixing a clique version of camp into
a public version of this sensibility, one he located in the “discrepancy” of Myra’s gender. By
doing so, Vidal’s “mean camp” harnessed the clique as an object of ridicule. But his imbrication
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of the clique in Myra Breckinridge revealed an attachment to this social formation even as he
poked fun at Tyler’s film criticism, one that could only be resolved by a willful “forgetting” of
Tyler at the narrative’s end. In a similar way, Tyler’s analysis of Phenomena shows that, in spite
of his purported efforts, this critic cannot shake off Tchelitchew’s attachment to his clique within
his own gossiping art criticism. Love, and the bastard “mystery” that was its offspring, remains
tethered to the perverse social formation of the clique, and the maladjusted emotions and desires
that cycle within its exclusive boundaries. This truth, one that Tyler does not fully acknowledge,
means his biographical tribute to Tchelitchew addresses an artistic community that Tyler frames
as only partially capable of recognizing the painter’s greatness. His greatness, therefore, entails
the risk of a negative aesthetic judgment from within the immediate social community of his
peers, who can receive his artistic output only from and through their clique position, and so
might mistake it as the sounds of a “crashing bore.” In different ways, Vidal and Tyler expose
the clique as the social formation that they are persistently negotiating in their writing: one that is
fraught with negativity, where sexual behavior is conjoined with social and aesthetic judgments,
and from which neither these writers nor their peers can quite completely detach.

Tyler and Tchelitchew: pansy texts, queer diminishments

In February 1967, Lincoln Kirstein was at a dinner party, where he ran into the aged literary
critic Edmund Wilson. Together they talked about the recent publication of The Divine Comedy
of Pavel Tchelitchew. Wilson recorded the encounter in his diary, writing about how much he
liked Kirstein, but he noted his diplomacy when their talk turned to Tyler’s work:
I did not say in Kirstein’s presence that it was a book about a pansy
written by a pansy for pansies; but I found that he objected to the kind
207
of implication of homosexuality that anyone who knew nothing about
Tchelitchew would have known about him from reading this book.
Everybody is agreed that it diminishes Tchelitchew as an artist.
21

Kirstein, who had invested both materially and emotionally in Tyler’s biography, had been
disappointed by the published version just as Tyler had anticipated (or at least this was what he
told homophobic custodians of America’s cultural life such as Wilson). In this vignette, The
Divine Comedy was received by Tyler’s peers as a “pansy” book, one that catered to an
effeminate homosexual cadre of artists, in which Kirstein might have been included. Beyond the
obvious stigmatizing work of the word “pansy,” the homophobia of Wilson’s aside is suggestive
of two interconnected things. The first is the way that, in Wilson’s view, the book’s sexual
associations commit it to a closed social network at the level of the text’s subject matter, its
production, and its reception. Tyler’s biography is a coterie text because of its sexual character,
which circumscribes its circulation, restricting it to the enclosure of the “pansy” – it is about one,
by one, and will only be read by them. The book’s insularity resembles the version of clique
camp that Tyler’s film criticism also modelled, the stuff that was suitable for an “intellectual
audience” only (Ford [2001], 21), or which could function as a “private code” between “small
urban cliques” (Sontag, 275). While Sontag was looking to “rescue” this camp sensibility from
homosexuality, Wilson was asserting that the queerness of the intellectual audience and/or urban
clique persisted in books like Tyler’s. This transparent sexual character received a dismissive
response from America’s representatives of mainstream artistic discourse.
The second thing that is notable about Wilson’s diary entry is the concern that he and
Kirstein shared about the book’s effect on those “outside” of this sexual community. For all the
ways that Tyler tried to elevate the artist he was writing about, his biography’s main

21
Edmund Wilson, The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960–1972, ed. and introduction by Lewis M. Dabney (New
York: FSG, 1994), 571–2.
208
transgression – for Wilson and, apparently, for Kirstein – was that it lacked social discretion. It
gave the public, those who didn’t know Tchelitchew on a personal level, an awareness of his
sexual predilections. In Wilson’s garbled wording, this is a definitional form of knowledge –
people go from knowing “nothing” about the painter to knowing everything, in so much as once
Tchelitchew is outed as a “pansy” he is defined by this sexual identity. This sexual knowledge
should be kept contained within the enclosed social realm of the painter’s coterie. Vidal – just
about – manages to successfully navigate his clique references and the popular appeal of Myra
Breckinridge without exposing himself to public judgments over his sexuality. But because Tyler
fails to stay button-lipped, making Tchelitchew’s sexuality a matter of legible public knowledge,
his ambition to read his friend’s paintings as something more than a coterie artist is a failure, at
least in Wilson and Kirstein’s eyes. By baring these details, by giving away these secrets – in
Sitwell’s words, by handing the painter over to “the wolves” – Tyler “diminishes Tchelitchew as
an artist.” Like the clique camp that Sontag superseded with a public version, Tyler stands
accused of vulgarizing Tchelitchew’s aesthetic practice by making his sexuality public (even if
the public reading this book was limited in Wilson’s definition to the “pansy”). The painter’s
association with homosexuality becomes a common kind of knowledge. For Wilson there is no
“mystery” that can be recuperated from this profane awareness.
Is this the fate for a coterie artist, once their social maneuverings and sexual desires are
made public? The tributes to Tyler and Tchelitchew, provided by Vidal and Tyler respectively,
indicate a process of dwindling artistic status that takes place within, and for, the clique in which
these artists and writers existed, even as their work maintains a structuring relationship with this
social realm in their work. As midcentury interests in modernist creativity morphed into an
engagement with the countercultural art practices of the nineteen-sixties, such as Happenings,
209
Pop Art, and Underground Cinema, what alternative did these clique figures face beyond a
public diminishment?
22
The other option seems just as grim, at least as Kirstein relayed
Tchelitchew’s fate to Wilson:
Kirstein told us that he had brought to Russia the big picture called
Phenomenon [sic], on which Tchelitchew had worked for years, and
that nobody knew anything about him or took any interest in the
picture. The Museum of Modern Art had had it sent back for an
exhibition of his works, and it was now laid away in their vaults.
(Wilson, 572)
Tchelitchew’s ambition to become an “INTERNATIONAL PERSONALITY” had ended
in failure, even in his homeland. As repeated by Wilson, this doesn’t even seem due to a
different aesthetic taste of the Soviet national culture. Rather, it is a matter of not being
known, of being as unrecognized on a global scale as much as you are forgotten in
America. This was a concern for Wilson and Kirstein when it came to Tchelitchew, as
they worried about how readers who “knew nothing about” the painter would respond to
Tyler’s book. Kirstein’s report of Tchelitchew’s reception in Russia almost acts as a
reassurance regarding Tyler’s indiscretions. The gossip of Tyler’s book is compounded
by the fact that public knowledge of his subject has already been “laid away in” the
forgotten vaults of America’s art institutions. The moment when indiscretions about
Tchelitchew would have mattered to a public has passed, just as at the end of Vidal’s
novel the time “for giving away any secrets” about East Coast intellectuals like Tyler is
over (Vidal [1987], 213).
Does this generational shift limit the impact of Tyler’s transgressions about his
biographical subject? Or do the gossipy transgressions of his book, blended in with the

22
Although he was influential in its formation, Tyler was hostile to many of the trends in Underground Cinema,
including Warhol’s films. See Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History, introduction by J. Hoberman
and afterword by Charles Boultenhouse, reprint (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995).

210
exalted ambitions of his critical reading of Tchelitchew, offer a way of sustaining a form
of knowledge about the painter, no matter what diminishments it also produces? Tyler,
whose writing credentials were misrecognized even by his own boyfriend’s mother, does
not provide a response to these questions in his work. But what this chapter, and this
dissertation, has examined is the status of coterie aesthetics in the midcentury United
States, and the uncertain feelings it created for writers and artists of this period, who –
whether popular, unknown, or fluctuating between different stages of recognition –
looked upon their own personal position within their cliques with varying degrees of
concern.
211
CONCLUSION
STUCK IN AMBIVALENCE

Out of touch, out of time, my primary subjects in Clique Modernism all evince feelings of
“stuckness” that I argue is indicative of the wider position of coterie aesthetics in America’s
midcentury creative culture. The quagmire of the clique appears in different ways across my four
chapters: there’s Ford, and the prismatic reflection of his own youthful artistic status that we can
perceive in his sexual pursuit of teenage boys. There’s Bowles, and the tortuous attachment to
her goony friends that she struggles to negotiate within the possibility of a popular reception for
her writing. And the whole point of the books by Toklas and Tyler that I analyze are to look back
on times past. In her memoir of her life with Stein in the Cookbook, as she represents the social
existence they shared, Toklas remains intent on preserving a shifting, evasive space where
private pleasures may continue to percolate, undisclosed to the reader. Tyler, even as his tribute
to Tchelitchew’s artistic genius reaches into the stratospheric heights of the cosmos, is always
confronting the clique relations in which his biographical subject – and Tyler himself –
participated. These feelings of stuckness can orbit around pleasures – be it Ford’s desire for an
Italian shepherd or Toklas’s desire for a fruity piece of mutton. But the affective experience of
attachment within the setting of the coterie tends to be a negative one. It points to the
dissatisfaction and disappointment faced by these figures within their status as coterie artists.
And yet the experience of stuckness is that you also don’t give up your intimate
attachments. To talk about this condition of stuckness, therefore, is not to suggest that these
writers were without agency over parts of their career or their social lives, even if they didn’t
necessarily feel hugely empowered. Whether in diary form or as a collection of recipes, a factual
212
biography or a fictional play, they all made their social lives the content of their work. What
comes across most consistently in their representations is the ambivalence of each of these
writers to their tight-knit social relations. What do they think of their friends? A lot of the time
that feels as unclear to them as it does to me studying them now. They judge their peers with
both affection and hostility, and are extremely sensitive to receiving these judgments in turn. The
instabilities and entanglements created by their ambivalence is what I have explored in Clique
Modernism. One could say that, as a result, the final resting place of this dissertation is the
realization that, in the emotional life of the coterie, there is no resting place. Within the
attachments of their social relations my subjects plug away in an almost permanently unsettled
state.
In the spirit of this unsettledness, then, I want to conclude by questioning the critical
value of ambivalence as the hot take of my project. What utility does such an analytical payoff
have for modernist studies? Over the course of my four chapters, I have teased states of
uncertainty, irresolution, and ambivalence out of the seemingly fixed judgments attached to a
coterie aesthetic practice. But is it a cop out to cling to such states, a case of ambivalence for
ambivalence’s sake, a desperate desire to pull grey areas and nuance out from the roots of
inexcusably bad behavior or irremediably negative feelings?
1
Is my project’s fixation on
ambivalence just one Hall and Oates song away from joining its primary subjects as an out of
touch, out of time relic?
In this anxious fretting over its utility, my study is participating in another version of the
series of “method melodramas” that David Kurnick recently identified taking place at the point
where queer studies intersects with the disciplinary practices of the wider humanities. Kurnick

1
For one formidable polemic against this kind of academic analysis, albeit in the context of sociology, see Kieran
Healy, “Fuck Nuance,” Sociological Theory 35, no.2 (2017): 118–27.
213
pushes back against “the moralized characterology through which we have been reflecting on our
critical practice” (Kurnick, 369), a characterology that I myself have teetered into with this past
paragraph about the probable limitations of Clique Modernism. What I think Kurnick means, at
least for my project, is that an awareness of a scholarly approach’s critical limitations might
work as the foundation for its analytical value, too. To understand ambivalence as inadequate as
an interpretative endpoint is also to recognize that inadequacy will always be being navigated
within the process of critical study. This attitude, I think, enables a more expansive
methodological approach that allows for a recognition of the pleasures and problems that emerge
when we are stuck in relation to feelings of ambivalence. It might not be completely edifying –
there might, as Toklas said of Bowles, be “no real pleasure” to derive here – but there remains
the possibility of limited intellectual satisfactions that can be squeezed out of the intricate social
relations I document over the course of these four chapters. And such an approach is also, I want
to end by suggesting, reflective of the experience of coterie aesthetics for my four subjects.
Marginal to begin with, maligned by their critics, these writers staked their claim to artistic value
upon this exclusive social formation. By doing so, they exist primarily within a compressed
social space where failure, weakness, and hopelessness are three of the sheets of distorted glass
in the fun house of mirrors by which they judge their own artistic status. But these individuals
also formulate a possibility of pleasure – sexual, social, artistic – out of the intimate attachments
that are represented in their coterie aesthetic practice. Inadequate though they may be, these
clique feelings may have to be enough; for this critical project, as much as they were for Ford,
Bowles, Toklas, and Tyler.
214
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Creator Beck, Nicholas Guy (author)

Core Title Clique modernism: coterie aesthetics in midcentury America

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2022-12

Publication Date 09/17/2022

Defense Date 08/18/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag artistic communities,cliques,coteries,mid-twentieth-century,modernism,North America,OAI-PMH Harvest,postwar literature and culture

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Language English

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Advisor Boone, Joseph Allen (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Campbell, Andrew (committee member), Echols, Alice (committee member), McCabe, Susan (committee member)

Creator Email nbeck@usc.edu,nick.beck9@gmail.com

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