Plasma Pool

In late January of this year, The Nation, across two issues, published an unfinished and discursive but fruitful memoiristic essay by Ted Solotaroff, who spent a career in political and literary editing beginning at Commentary in the ideologically tumultuous 1960s. It is illuminating for anyone interested in this period, when the nation’s intellectual heft began to swing decidedly to the right—as the Manhattan of Solotaroff, “the Normans” (Podhoretz and Mailer), and others of that set provides any number of demonstrable, relatable metrics for—a swing that determined the political and social structures of our own period. This is important because the ways those structures evolved is instructive for those of us who wish to map, influence, or create the political and social structures of the future. Solotaroff gets us inside the heads of some of the people whose contingent thoughts and actions set that formation in motion.

Ted Solotaroff

Solotaroff’s essay is an especially good read for serious editors, who inevitably confront complex moral questions, often in environments rife with various sorts of conflicting demands and allegiances. Here, Solotaroff, at this point an intellectually nubile associate editor, fresh from a woefully lacking graduate experience in English at the University of Chicago (which is since thankfully much improved), has reached his wits’ end with a shitty but socially-useful piece that Podhoretz wants, for noble political reasons, to publish. This scenario was and is common. Those who know the most about politics, policy, and society by contemporary standards—those who process and possess data—tend to be horrendous at writing persuasively about their knowledge. Worried about the prospects for the dreadful but valuable piece he’s put a good deal of effort into improving, Solotaroff goes to his direct superior, managing editor Sherry Abel:

Bad but important writing poses serious moral problems for editor and writer—and for movement, if one’s at stake, and here one certainly is. (And now one certainly is, whatever it will come to be called.) Publishing a poorly-put piece about an important idea isn’t just aesthetically displeasing, it’s intellectually dangerous. Shitty formulations lead to shitty thinking, and shitty thinking leads to shitty policy—because shitty thinking leads to shitty everything. The more crucial that the information be put out for a politically or socially advantageous purpose, the more important that it be formulated in a way that will enable its advantageous use. And making that happen requires a sort of thinking work that can’t really be taught, only learned through trial, error, and the careful study of past attempts. Aesthetics and politics are not distinguishable here: not in Solotaroff’s head, not in the reader’s head, and not in reality—not in how they produce material effects.

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The first half of Solotaroff’s essay treats the politics of internecine midcentury literary-political editing; the second half traces his relationships with his later writers—after his estrangement from the supercilious Podhoretz and much of the intelligentsia that gathered around him—notably Cynthia Ozick and, hugely, the subjectively-unhinged critic, fiction writer, and jetsetting homosexual intellectual Alfred Chester. “Instead of the Paris that the Paris Review circle, Susan Sontag and other New York literary types had all visited,” says Solotaroff, “I had Alfred”:

Alfred had grown up as the youngest child in an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn and was marked by a treatment for a childhood illness that left him not only bald for life but also without eyebrows, eyelashes and body hair. With his scruffy, outlandish orange-red wig, which sat uneasily on his head, he looked bizarre. Without it, his narrow blue eyes, usually glinting with irony, his chubby cheeks and his sexy pout of a mouth came more sharply into view and made him look like a Jewish Pan.

Chester, the quintessential bohemian queen, was also, surprisingly to some, an unapologetic moralist. Solotaroff says that his “rebellion against his family and his heritage, drummed into him by Jewish day school, had left him a kind of cynic manqué, subject to outbursts of moral passion.” Chester’s moralizing, in fact, grew squarely from his particular queerness and the obstacles and opportunities it had placed before him.

Chester led a peripatetic life vexed by poverty, alienation, and aberrant desire, all of which cohere in Solotaroff’s recollection of their first meeting:

[O]ne afternoon [he came] to ask for an advance on his next piece for us. He wasn’t wearing his wig that day, and I was conscious of a certain nimble boyishness coexisting with his bald, dissolute face: Huck Finn meets the Baron de Charlus. When I asked him where he wanted to go for a drink, he said, “Oh, any Irish gin mill will do. Nothing Upper East Side.” Then he said, “How do you like my outfit?”

He was wearing a ragged French sailor blouse, soiled white duck pants and sandals. “I’d say you look like a French Quarter cafe writer down on his luck.”

“Perfect,” he said. “I didn’t know you, so I decided to dress down. The impoverished look. Is Norman going to give me the advance?”

“Sure,” I said. “You’re a catch.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me for at least a week.” Then he said, “Don’t worry. I can tell you’re straight as a string.” And giving me the eye, he said, “But if you ever decide to broaden your experience, there are a few things I’d like to show you.”

Basking a bit in his flirtatiousness, I lost my uneasiness about his rapier wit, and we hit it off from the start.

Solotaroff and Chester’s relationship remained intimately platonic, but Chester seems to have cast about for love in this way most of his life. In the process, in his life of lonely amorous wandering, he made a profoundly personal ethics of it. We see this ethics at work in his fearless treatment of Charles Kinbote’s psychotic queer desire for the poet John Shade in his review of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Solotaroff:

[Alfred] gave [Nabokov's book] high marks for its being “marvelously disrespectful” of the conventions of the novel; for its masterful construction; for its trafficking in the unconscious, which creates a phenomenology that is both absurd and filled with “inaccessible, unrecognizable, but very potent horror”—reality as filtered through the mind of the indefatigable and mad narrator, the mythomaniac émigré Charles Kinbote.

But after such lavish praise, Chester abruptly draws a machete:

In Kinbote, whose desire—and the psychosis that sustain it—gives Pale Fire its form, Chester clearly sees the “very potent horror” of himself. But Nabokov’s “humor” would have Chester, or something of him, a pitiable, oblivious fiend; or, as Shade’s wife and Kinbote’s constant passive antagonist says, “an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm; the monstrous parasite of genius.” Chester will have none of it. Our psychotic queer claims for himself the moral high road—higher than both those who moralize against him and those who, like Nabokov, would make of him a queer tragic mulatto, a comic exemplar rather than a person. Nabokov is “without innocence”; he appears to comprehend impeccably the minds he mocks, and so should know far better. So says Chester in reply to Nabokov’s inadvertent challenge: to diagnose a book that diagnoses you first.

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