The Book of Lies

THE BOOK OF LIES

by Felice Picano

Best Gay Men’s Fiction

Lambda Literary Finalist

Foreword by David Bergman

ReQueered Tales

Los Angeles  •  Toronto

2020

The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

Copyright © 1998 by Felice Picano.

Foreword: copyright © 2020 by David Bergman.

Afterword: copyright © 2020 by Felice Picano.

Cover design: Dawné Dominique, DusktilDawn Designs.

First American edition: 1998

This edition: ReQueered Tales, October 2020

ReQueered Tales version 1.45

Kindle edition ASIN: B08H7XHTKN

ePub edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-31-3

Print edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-32-0

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Also by FELICE PICANO

CITY ON A STAR

Dryland’s End (1995)

The Betrothal at Usk (2021)

A Bard on Hercular (2022)

NOVELS

Smart as the Devil (1975)

Eyes (1975)

The Mesmerist (1977)

The Lure (1979)

Late in the Season (1981)

House of Cards (1984)

To the Seventh Power (1989)

Like People in History (1995)

Looking Glass Lives (1998)

The Book of Lies (1998)

Onyx (2001)

Justify My Sins (2018)

Pursuit: A Victorian Entertainment (2021)

Pursued: Lillian’s Story (2022)

OTHER FICTION

An Asian Minor (1981)

Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love (1982)

The New York Years (2000)

Tales from a Distant Planet (2006)

Twelve O’Clock Tales (2012)

Twentieth Century Un-limited: Two Novellas (2013)

MEMOIRS

Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children (1985)

Men Who Loved Me (1989)

A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay (1997)

Fred in Love (2005)

Art and Sex in Greenwich Village (2007)

True Stories: Portraits from My Past (2011)

True Stories Too: People and Places From My Past (2014)

Nights at Rizzoli (2014)

Praise for THE BOOK OF LIES

"The Book of Lies is funny, dark, sexy, shocking, and yes, smart. Set in the near future (‘decades after Stonewall’), the novel tells of a young scholar trying to make his academic bones on the literary bodies of the ‘Purple Circle’. Picano skewers the pedagogically pretentious with ease and wit. A wonderful novel, with some of Picano's best writing."

— Bay Area Reporter

"Overall, the mature writing of Felice Picano and fellow ex-Violet Quill member, Edmund White, confirms what has been long suspected: the gay writing that has emerged from America over the last three decades is as consistently brilliant as writing has got. As a critique of the catastrophic changes undergone by the gay community, The Book of Lies is fascinating; as a brilliant story with a vicious twist, it’s superb. A highly recommended read."

— George Lear,

Purefiction.com

Based on Picano's involvement with the Violet Quill Club (which included Edmund White and Christopher Cox), this is an absorbing Henry James-style comedy of manners about how even when some writers find their way out of the closet, others still get left behind.

— The Mail on Sunday

Leave it to Felice Picano to add a walloping dose of melodrama and intrigue to a tale already redrawing genre boundaries … What Picano does is take an academic mystery (subject matter that might have proved tedious or solipsistic in lesser hands) and morphs it into something new – a page-turning, often campy, occasionally serious critique of academia and historical truth, literary celebrity, and the imminent future of America.

— Philadelphia Tribune

Picano treats his nonpulpy subject matter – grieving, the book business, the teaching business – in a pulpy way, and the results are surprisingly entertaining.

— The New York Times Book Review

Felice Picano’s Book of Lies has something guaranteed to please just about everyone ... an engaging, metafictive, literary whodunit ...

— Lambda Book Report

Felice Picano's new novel, his 19th book, is a story rich with history – a history that Picano himself was part of and helped shape ...

— The Washington Blade

Felice Picano has cunningly sidestepped the pitfall of ‘writer as hero’ in his latest creation, The Book of Lies, and added a further twist, examining not only a group of writes and their work, but taking a hard look at the validity and integrity of literary criticism. Readers will immediately be reminded of Henry James’ The Aspern Papers, as well as touches of Passolini’s Theorem, in this thoroughly engrossing tale of literary and academic intrigue. The theme of coping with the mass loss of the 80s and 90s is subtle and well handled by Picano, and he's also thought-provoking on the issue of ghetto writing: The Gay Lit. world can't, on one hand, complain about marginilisation, and on the other, whine that straight people have neither right to study, nor any understanding of, gay literature. Most of all, he demonstrates the impossibility of empirical history: all is agenda."

— Gay Times

An exciting plot, believable dialogue and interesting characters ensure an entertaining read.

— Gay Community News

... Picano is successful in his gossipy recreation of the group of gay literary innovators.

— Publishers Weekly

... [A] novel that is smart and sexy and funny and historically compelling ... the best and most entertaining novel of 1999.

— Bay Area Reporter

"Stunning Writing ... Part literary mystery, part history lesson, Felice Picano’s The Book of Lies, turned out to be a surprisingly engrossing read ... full of wit and humor, the dark tone of the ending caught me by surprise. I highly recommend this book."

— Josh Aterovis, Killian Kendall series

FELICE PICANO

Felice Picano is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano also began and operated the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. His first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he’s been nominated for and/or won dozens of literary awards. 

A five-time Lambda Literary Award nominee, Picano’s books include the best-selling novels The Book of Lies, Like People in History, and Looking Glass Lives as well as the literary memoirs Men Who Loved Me and A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay. Along with Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Edmund White, and George Whitmore, he founded the Violet Quill Club to promote and increase the visibility of gay authors and their works. In 2009, the Lambda Literary Foundation awarded Picano its Lifetime Achievement/Pioneer Award. Originally from New York, the author now lives in Los Angeles.

THE BOOK OF LIES

by Felice Picano

Another Truth in The Book of Lies

Before The Book of Lies appeared in 1998, a friend – I think it was Richard Howard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning-poet – gave me an uncorrected proof of the book with the ominous advice that I had better read it. And so it was that with a certain trepidation, I began The Book of Lies.

What was I afraid of? That I might be pictured in an unflattering light in the book. The narrator of The Book of Lies is Ross Ohrenstedt, an ambitious academic. I was an academic with certain ambitions. In The Book of Lies, Ross is at work on a doctoral dissertation on the first important group of gay writers to emerge after Stonewall called the Purple Circle. In 1993, I published The Violet Hour, the first full-length study of the Violet Quill, the first important group of gay writers to emerge after Stonewall. As I read on, I discovered another character, Reuben Weatherbury, edits a two-volume collection called The Purple Circle Reader. In 1994, I had brought out a single volume entitled The Violet Quill Reader. One of the repeated subjects in The Book of Lies is that a foundation is buying the papers of all the members of the Purple Circle. At the time I was doing research, the Beineke Library at Yale was acquiring the papers of the Violet Quill. In fact, I found Chris Cox’s papers in the process of researching the book. Only the lamest reader could miss the comparison between The Violet Quill, of whom Felice Picano was an important member, and the Purple Circle, the subject of his novel. In short, I feared that Felice might have done what the Purple Circle author, Rowland Etheridge, did to his other Purple Circle members, that is write a roman-à-clef in which the members of the Purple Circle are queasily portrayed in a combination of high satire and affection.

I soon learned I had nothing to fear. The Book of Lies is all affection. For example, when Picano mocks Andrew Holleran’s notorious untidiness in Aaron Axelfeld’s Fibber McGee closet, the jokes are in good fun, poking at a foible that Holleran is the first to acknowledge. When the narrator finally visits Axelfeld, he finds that Axelfeld is not at all the hoarder he has been led to expect. I’m happy to say that Picano makes clear that I have nothing to do with Ross Ohrenstedt in the first few pages when Ross meets Damon Van Slyke, who bears a certain resemblance to Edmund White (but bears a greater likeness to Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams). Ross shakes hands with the elderly author, who gushes over the young man who will be preparing his papers for transport. You’re even handsomer than I remember from our former meeting. And such a butch name: Ross Ohrenstadt! Not that you don’t look butch enough to carry it. You unquestionably do. No one has ever thought my name or my person particularly butch. But Ross could not be me because of the question of age. I’m only six years younger than Picano. If not from the same generation, we share a similar cohort. Ross is clearly a young man, perhaps not as young as he appears, but young nevertheless. Then, am I the model for Reuben Weatherbury, the editor of The Purple Circle Reader? The answer is equally clear no. When Ross first sees Weatherbury, he finds a middle-aged, heavy-set, man with tons of gray-flecked hair in a tank top, running shorts, and air shoes. I have never owned such clothing (until very recently, I avoided exercise as much as I could) and went bald before my hair turned gray. Besides Weatherbury is much nicer guy than I am.

What can we make of this? On the one hand, I am nowhere in The Book of Lies. On the other hand, pieces of me float up from time to time. Ross thinks of himself as a literary detective, and Picano knew about my detective work to find Chris Cox’s papers. He gave me advice about how to handle Robert Ferro’s family when I spent nearly a week at Ferro’s father’s house going through the papers in the attic or the books in the basement. Felice and I had talked about that even when graduate schools teach you to do archival work (mine didn’t), they never give a hint about the diplomatic efforts needed to deal not just with living authors, but also the far more difficult, literary executors, who can be simultaneously exuberant and suspicious, defensive and intrusive. One of the major achievements of The Book of Lies is how well Picano depicts what it means to do the literary work I spent decades doing. So I am spread out between Ross and Reuben Weatherbury and maybe some of the other minor characters.

As it is, The Book of Lies is a big book filled with many characters. The Purple Circle has nine members; the Violet Quill had seven. In his afterward, Picano explains the addition. In both the fictional and the actual literary group all but three die of AIDS, which means the majority of the authors have literary executors that must be dealt with. So The Book of Lies involves fifteen characters directly involved with the Purple Circle. Then there is Ross, his students, his fellow graduate students, and his dissertation advisor, a hilarious portrait modelled on George Stambolian, the elderly Franco-Armenian-American scholar closely associated with the Violet Quill. The action moves around California, Florida and Cape Cod (but interestingly avoids New York). It is as far as I know, Picano’s densest and widest novel. But for me, the density is magnified. Aspects of the fictional characters keep reminding me of actual people. For example Jonathan Flitch, mentioned briefly at the beginning of the novel, calls to mind Patrick Merla, a wonderful but prickly editor discovered by Edmund White. While reading the novel the fictional characters are shadowed by actual people. It would be simpler if it were a one-to-one association. But Picano hasn’t made it that simple for us. The Book of Lies is haunted by the truth, but it is not an individual truth, but a group portrait. It is as if the writers of the Violet Quill came together and swapped parts of their personalities to make up characters that didn’t match any one personality exactly, but was the melding of the group as a whole. Say if Rembrandt, in painting The Night Watch, took the nose of one of the officers and placed it on a guard and then took the guard’s hand and gave it to the officer whose nose was stolen. Then Rembrandt took the nose from another guard and gave it to the noseless officer who switched hips with yet another. In the end you would get a group portrait, but not one of the figures would resemble any individual as they truly were. The Book of Lies, I think, aspires to be such a group portrait so that it can grow and grow until it becomes its own world.

— David Bergman

March, 2020

David Bergman is professor emeritus of English at Towson University. The editor of The Violet Quill Reader, he has won awards for his collection of poems, Cracking the Code, his book Gaiety Transfigured: Self-Representation in Gay American Literature, and for editing the anthology Men on Men 2000. He is the author of The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture.

To Andrew Holleran

The Baron told her only Art meant anything.

– Edward Gorey,

The Gilded Bat

PROLOGUE

‘EVERY MAN OF SUBSTANCE AND IMAGINATION has his Dark Lady of the Sonnets,’ Mr Crassius used to tell us in English class. ‘She doesn’t have to be a lady. She doesn’t even have to be a she. Some time or other in the life of the fully lived man, someone will come along and seize the senses and the emotions so fully, you are left gasping, pleading for relief. It’s a roller-coaster ride. To heaven – and to hell! And if you haven’t been driven completely insane, in the end all you ask is to escape without too much humiliation.’

Mr Crassius would hyperventilate a bit as though words alone couldn’t adequately explain what he meant, his eyes would goggle out of his head, beads of perspiration would appear upon his usually blank face with its line-patterned forehead and along the side of his large, and very unRoman nose, which he’d quickly wipe off, and we students would sit there totally embarrassed yet secretly pleased, doing all we could not to giggle, until, as would invariably happen, Crassius would suddenly pop out of his self-induced trance, straighten out his tortoiseshell glasses, pat down the front of one or another of the several tweed vests he always wore over a starched white shirt to class, and once again he’d become our boring, middle-aged English teacher.

The result of these infrequent bouts would leave us boys in no doubt whatsoever that Mr Crassius himself had once had such a ‘Dark Lady’ in his life, and that he’d barely escaped her eldritch clutches with what he now (to us who knew its humdrum details as only students in such a closed world could) laughingly called his life.

On those rare mornings following such an outburst, we’d explode out of his overheated classroom at Lovecraft Hall, spill in a group across the icy steps and onto the poorly snow-swept paths of Tipton, asking each other in that half-mocking, half-sincere manner of all adolescents in all countries of the world and all times in history whether or not any of us hoped for such an all-encompassing love, such a thorough overhaul of our emotions, and we six closest – the little group that had come to hang out together the most often, known to ourselves and others on campus by the silly if not entirely inaccurate name of ‘The Thought Club’ (sometimes to our detractors as The Taut-Trousers Club’) – would debate this issue with complete thoroughness until we’d reached our next class across the quad or had otherwise broken up, headed variously on our own ways.

I was always the skeptic. I’d call Crassius an ‘old lameoid’ and repeat what my father always told me, ‘Men are ruled by money and power. Women are ruled by love.’ And Nicky Ballette would grab his crotch and say ‘I’m ruled by this!’ (So true, and one reason why we were known as the Taut-Trousers Club.) And we’d laugh and punch his arm and tumble with each other into the white, pure snow banks that seemed to fill the northern New England quad almost half of the school year, horsing around until one of us shouted, ‘Hey! This faggot grabbed my dick!’ or something equally offensive, and we would pile on top of the alleged offender for a free-for-all in which we managed to vent our aggression by punching someone while at the same time having the satisfaction of having our genitals handled, before one of us – Wayne or Herb – pulled himself out of the squirming mess, acting suddenly dignified, and said in his most manly fourteen-year-old tone of voice, ‘I don’t know about you queers, but I’ve got swim practice (or chemistry class or School paper) to go to.’ At which point we’d slowly unscramble from the heap, giving our closest neighbor a sneaky, final jab or knuckle-rub before straightening out our rumpled, snow-covered, hard-on-tautened Levi’s and corduroys, and split up into twos and threes to go off and do what was required by our prep-school careers for the next hour.

It’s true that I never believed in Crassius’s Dark Lady theory. Not through prep school, not later on in my undergraduate years at Harvard, not while I was getting my MA at Columbia, and in truth I never in my life ever expected to believe the theory. But that seems ages ago, before I arrived at UCLA to study for my doctorate under Irian St George, before I fell under the spell of his well-known personal charms, academic brilliance and suave persuasiveness … But wait! I don't want you to get the idea that the elderly Franco-Armenian-American scholar – personally delightful as he might have been – was my Dark Lady. Ridiculous as that sounds, I sometimes wish it were true, because it would be so uncomplicated. Well, relatively uncomplicated, compared to the more Byzantine and unpalatable truth.

No, while St George is undoubtedly responsible for leading me onto the path I eventually took, it wasn’t all him. And no, it wasn’t (though people have speculated, gossiped) even the great author Damon Von Slyke, at whose home in the Hollywood Hills I ended up living that fateful summer, ostensibly to catalogue the enormous mass of thirty-eight years of his manuscripts and papers preparatory to their being packaged and sent off (sold off really, and for a pretty penny) to a prestigious university library back East. After all, Von Slyke was in Europe all that summer: from London to Hamburg to Majorca. Once the job was set up and the keys to the house handed to me, and Conchita, the maid’s, days arranged, I was left alone. I think we only slept one night in the place, he in the master suite, I in a guest bedroom across the courtyard with its ceramic colored Cuernavaca tiles and fountain.

It’s really so difficult to begin to explain how it all happened, to explain what happened; it all became so snarled up and confused, so fraught with non-essential matters, encumbrances having to do with gaining tenure and securing academic standing, with publicity and publishing, with the personal lives of, well, of myself, among others. So, let me just say straight out that none of it was planned, there was never any malice aforethought, certainly no hint that I’d find anything quite so explosive.

And yes, if you must have it spelled out, it all happened by accident (though Von Slyke and St George would tell you there’s no such thing as ‘accident’): the accident being that among Von Slyke’s scores of cardboard boxes of manuscripts and papers I discovered … a manuscript … and through that single, at first utterly baffling and later on revelatory discovery, I made other discoveries – not only of works, but of the existence of a certain person until then totally unknown to any scholar or historian of the 1970s and 1980s. And how as a result of discovering this person, I unearthed his various relationships to and effects upon not only Von Slyke, but also Dominic De Petrie and Jeff Weber and Aaron Axenfeld, on Cameron Powers and Rowland Etheridge, on Mitchell Leo and Frankie McKewen and Mark Dodge, all the members of the legendary Purple Circle (as well as his effect upon some of their hangers-on), and thus his centrality of influence upon what we know to be that bursting bright nova of American literature in the last decades of the twentieth century.

So, yes, that was the key moment, when everything changed, although I didn’t know it at the time, thought something else was going on, certainly not anything that would forever alter my understanding, my sense of values, my life itself. And yes, it’s only natural, after all that, that a little thing like a belief would also easily fall victim.

I’m still not certain this is how I should do it. Or even if I should do it. Except there are so many people who hate me now for what happened, who blame me and who are convinced it was deliberate, that I wanted to undermine and expose, sought to destroy, carried secret prejudices, harbored low motives from the very beginning. From before the beginning.

None of which is true: I swear it!

I’m getting nowhere, circling, and circling, like a half-blinded bird over some fallen morsel. Bird of prey, others would say, over some not yet fully dead creature. Carnivorous insect, even others would say, attracted to the putrid, rotting flesh of long-dead carcasses.

Maybe I’d better try at what was the actual beginning – I don’t know how else to do it – the late morning that I drove my newly leased Celica convertible to Von Slyke’s house …

BOOK ONE

The Von Slyke Papers

From the pubescently trembling onset itself, we’d dared aspire to that lofty elevation, into the nearly godly presence our incomplete knowledge hinted at, and which our as yet untried instincts assured us existed; not at some vast remove, but instead here at hand, fluttering almost peripheral, within our grasp; if only we dared … extend ourselves

Damon Von Slyke,

Systems for Approaching Emmeline

IT WAS A LATE MAY MORNING as I drove my newly leased, late-model Celica convertible to Damon Von Slyke’s house. Being a relative stranger to the so-called ‘Southland’, I was closely following his directions, from Westwood along Sunset Boulevard through the famous Sunset Strip, turning at Laurel Canyon first onto Hollywood Boulevard, then, a few blocks later, turning again onto Franklin Avenue, where I cruised several blocks high above the old and imperfectly revitalized Hollywood of our day: a residential neighborhood redolent of the Cinema town of two-thirds of a century ago; lengthy blocks where 1920s high-rises with French names and Gallo-Gothic architectural ornaments were interspersed with vaguely Spanish-style garden apartments. The north side of the street was suddenly different, covered in foliage – spindly poinsettia trees with blackish bark and hot red flowers larger than your head, grotesquely twisted pine trees, lush candleflower bushes, fragrant eucalyptus, mixed with cerise bougainvillaea’s papery flowers and clumps of Birds of Paradise, growing hard and straight like primeval cycads, all of it luxuriant and tropical, Eocene and slapdash, designed to hide yards and yards of twenty-foot-high wrought-iron fencing and gates, behind which lay Runyon Canyon, several semi-public gardens and a score of big silent-movie-star mansions put up when the town below was a handful of Victorian wooden houses along a newly macadamized main street.

After driving past twice, I at last found my turn onto the liana-overhung gloom of a dead-end road and, slowly inching along its narrow length, located the frond-hidden sign. Following Von Slyke’s earlier instructions, I used my car phone to call.

‘Hi!’ Von Slyke answered, as always sounding about twelve years old. ‘You made it! Now when we hang up, point the phone at the sign, hit the pound key and dial these numbers, 7-5-8-8. It spells S-L-U-T,’ he giggled, ‘and shall, skittishly, let you in.’

I did as instructed and a large, until then invisible, gate clanged and drew inward. I drove the Celica into what might have been a scene out of a Disney animated movie: a curved gravel driveway defined by huge trees susurrating in the breeze so that every one of their millions of purple flowers stirred, their brown-black limbs and trunks dark against a background of bushes white with what smelled to be jasmine and honeysuckle, all of it - trees, jasmine, honeysuckle - perfuming the air as though it weren’t outdoors, but within the labyrinth of a sultan’s most secret harem.

I slowly circuited a softball-diamond-sized island of grass and flowers, dominated by a Spanish-style bird-bath set in a mass of pink and orange azalea, out of which, at the Celica’s approach, a fistful of large blue birds exploded into the air. They wheeled as I slowly passed what looked like the hedge-darkened front of a single-story house, and arrived at my next turn, the porte-cochère built into an extension of the house’s stucco front wall, where, as previously instructed, I parked next to Von Slyke’s expensive-looking silver sport utility vehicle.

Looking deeper into the driveway, I could make out through the tangle of wild oleander what old architecture books called a ‘motor court’ and, beyond it, the three closed doors of the garage, festooned with lilacs. The unexpectedly long stuccoed wall seemed shut, the deep-set windows at varying heights of a tower-like structure - wreathed in more bougainvillaea - appeared closed up. The heavily carved, deep-stained wooden door, barely visible through trailing yellow hibiscus, was sealed off.

I walked around to what I supposed to be the front of the house, seeking ingress. I’d just spotted a path along which I determined my steps would lead past a two-story window, barely visible behind yet more, this time orange, hibiscus blooms, and from there into a partly covered entryway when I heard Slyke shouting from a direction ninety degrees away, ‘Here! Over here!’

He was on the opposite side of the circular driveway, beneath two more of the unearthly-looking purple trees, sprawled upon the floral cushions of what seemed to be a once white-painted, now weather-mottled wickerwork lounge chair. A battered tan Maine fishing hat with curled brim lay high on his ginger and white hair. He wore soiled white painter’s pants and an oversized T-shirt that barely hid his bulk, but, like his voice, his face was much younger than the sixty-five years I knew he’d amassed.

He’d been writing something on a pad of yellow foolscap and seemed to hastily finish off a sentence before closing the pad and covering it up with a cellular phone as I approached, threading my way through the azalea, so the birds which had just resettled on the lip of their bath once more rose, large and bright blue and surprisingly soft-voiced. I was still half turned to watch them when I reached the chaise.

‘May the bluebird of happiness shit on your head!’ Von Slyke laughed. ‘They’re genuine California bluebirds. During the fall and winter, they feast on the olives from those trees’ – he pointed to the dark foliage of what I’d taken to be the front of the house – ‘which fall by the bushel and stain the pathways black and drive my gardener to distraction. God knows what they eat in spring.’

While putting out a white hand to be shaken, he added, ‘You’re even handsomer than I remembered from our brief meeting. And such a butch name: Ross Ohrenstedt! Not that you don’t look butch enough to carry it. You unquestionably do.’ He finally let go of my hand. ‘Have a seat’ – pointing to a wrought-iron chair drawn up next to the chaise. ‘Want some coffee? It’s cold, I’m afraid. It’s always cold. In fact one of the best-kept secrets about southern California is how, despite the constant year-round heat, everything is always getting cold. Cole Porter wasn’t kidding when he wrote in that song, She hates California. It’s cold and it’s damp. You don’t believe me?’

‘No, I believe,’ I said. ‘It’s just all so … you know, so pretty and clean and so, well, so fabulously verdant. Back East everyone gives this place a bad rap. I’m embarrassed I’m not finding it so.’

Everything – table, hat, lawn – was covered with, patterned by, scores of fallen purple blossoms. I bent to pick one up. Odorless. So where did that musky smell come from? The bark?

‘Whatever are all these purple trees? They’re unreal.’

‘Jac-a-ran-da!’ Von Slyke said. ‘Or yak-a-rahn-da, if you prefer Spanish. Although I’m not certain they’re Spanish to begin with, or even native. They look like they should be from Bali or someplace like that, don’t they? I do know the entire city was planted with them for the 1932 Olympic Games. And I do mean everywhere. Even South Central.’

‘I hope,’ I quickly said, ‘I’ve not come at a bad time. I didn’t mean to interrupt any writing.’

‘No, not at all. I do all my writing in the morning. This was just a letter.’ He smiled boyishly, despite the hair-color job that needed immediate and serious touching up and the pasty-colored sagging skin of his cheeks and jowls and the overcartilaged (by age and good food and drink) nose and ears. Von Slyke smiled boyishly, just as it’s been reflected in the hundreds of photos of him and on TV interviews and in those two documentary films made about his life; boyishly, as though that was Von Slyke’s natural role in life, not at all a put-on, as others have darkly hinted; and I thought with a thrill, here I am, at his house, and despite Dr St George’s warning that Von Slyke could be simultaneously charming and devious, he was being instead comfortable with me, polite.

‘My mother,’ Von Slyke said, clearly amusing himself with what was about to come, ‘a woman of decided views, now deceased, totally despised California, although I don’t believe she ever in her life stepped foot here. She was personally offended by anything having to do with the state. She would hear some news report about it on the radio or read some item about it in a newspaper and she’d snort and harumph. I’m not kidding, she would actually snort and harumph. Only time I ever heard anyone do that. Her worst put-down of a person was that they’d moved to Los Angeles, or worse that they’d gone Hollywood, which she always said as though it were between inverted commas, and had come from the title of some slashing expose, an article by Clare Boothe Luce she’d read in her youth perhaps. So naturally … this would be where I ended up. What do you think it means when a person has gone Hollywood?’

He’d stopped me by the suddenness of the question, coming in the middle of all that flattery and candor, and I had to remind myself that he still wasn’t certain of me, didn’t trust Irian St George’s estimation but had to know for himself, and might – like some character out of some old Märchen – be determined to test me. I decided to be completely open.

‘I used to think it meant a person had become stuck up, snobby, all façade. But recently someone who’s lived here a few years told me what he thought it meant and I’ve thought about it and I’ve come to adopt his definition. So, here it is: going Hollywood means being able to stand up old friends, stiff former acquaintances, not return phone calls and letters of former lovers and … this is the key element … being able to rationalize it all by telling yourself you’re too busy making money and getting famous.’

‘Bra-vo!’ Von Slyke applauded. ‘Said with the cynicism, slashing wit and honesty of a true follower of the Purple Circle! Rowland Etheridge must be squirming with delight in his dark little grave, deep in Ole Virginny! But you know’ – he was suddenly thoughtful - ‘if you come here, stay here in this house while I’m away all summer, sorting out that utter bedlam of papers inside, you’ll be right in the very heartless heart of Hollywood: zip code, town line … Why, even the phone number spells out Beachwood, like in the ’60s song: Beachwood Five-Six-Seven-Eight-Nine. Doesn’t that intrigue you? Scare you?

‘No, of course it doesn’t,’ he answered himself. ‘After all, despite your stellar face and spectacular body, you’re not just some Santa Monica Boulevard clone looking to break into TV commercials, are you? You’re a Serious Scholar. And all such ideas are totally beyond you. What was it exactly that St George told me about you? That you’re his most promising colleague in a decade. That you’d read all of the Purple Circle’s works while still in grade school –’

‘That’s not exactly true,’ I interrupted. ‘I discovered your novel Instigations in my prep-school library. I don’t know how it had gotten in there, frankly, because all the other books were pretty old and conventional. And to tell the truth, I’m not even sure now I had a glimmer of what your book was about at the time. I did know it excited me far more than For Whom the Bell Tolls or Catch-22, which is what we were reading in class that term. And, of course, your book opened a door …’ I let that hang, not wanting to say too much. ‘It was only later, when I was in Cambridge, Mass., that I got around to reading all of your work. All of all of your work,’ I added, meaning the entire group he’d belonged to briefly, famously, a quarter-century before, and lest he think I was flattering him.

Clearly I’d said what he wanted to hear, because Von Slyke’s eyes, which had up until now been focused on me in a general sort of way, with darting, openly evaluational glances at my well-muscled arms, legs and crotch – I’d been clever enough to follow St George’s guidance in accentuating it with a one-size-too-small pure-cotton white T-shirt, tartan flannel gym shorts, custard ankle socks and ‘natural’ leather work boots – now looked at me fully face to face. I could at last gauge whether or not the writer’s eyes were ‘a junkety, watery blue like the flotsam-filled Great South Bay two days after some remarkably disappointing storm’, as he’d written of the protagonist of the novel I’d first read, which after all – and not all that early in his life – had made his name. Or if, instead, Von Slyke’s eyes were ‘iced and sharp, like the trined iron sides of one of those overpolished slide rules mathematics nerds suddenly sweep out of their chem notebooks and apply to a numerical riddle’, as he’d written of another protagonist, Jamie Dollinger, in the more recent DOS: Manuscript in Distress.

‘You’re an assistant professor at UCLA?’ he added, rather than asked. And when I nodded. ‘You don’t have summer classes?’

‘I didn’t … but Dr St George asked me to take over a class another professor couldn’t handle because of family problems. It’s undergrad Twentieth-century American Lit. But I did manage to subversively get stories by Capote, plays by Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry onto the classes’ dozen required books, which isn’t bad: one out of four. And I added tons of Purple Circle books to the additional reading list … I can easily handle an undergrad class and do the cataloguing, if that worries you.’

‘I don’t for a second doubt you. It’s no wonder St George adores you,’ Von Slyke said. ‘Do you do other favors for him? Personal ones?’

Before I could register what he’d asked, Von Slyke answered himself, ‘Of course you don’t. You’re probably terribly insulted I brought up the subject. What you must think of me! I’m such a ditz sometimes. I blame it on all that cocaine I sniffed at Studio 54. I’m certain now it forever stripped my brain cells of common sense. Not that I ever was a member of the place, like Dom and Mark of course.’ He meant other Purple Circlers, Dominic De Petrie and Mark Dodge. ‘I was far too unattractive to be a regular of that, or indeed any of the really select clubs in the ’70s. Whereas they, especially Mark, virtually lived at Flamingo! But, you know, one of the things that no one seems to get anymore about we Purples was that we were buddies. And the others were always were so sweet, the way they’d go out of their way to make certain I wasn’t left out of their reindeer games. Every year like clockwork I was invited to the White Party and the Black Party, the opening party and the closing-for-the-season party. The Leo-McKewens would call me a week before New Year’s and say, Don’t breathe a word, but we’ve got tickets to Studio One for the big night, two suites at the Chateau Marmont and at least one high-priced hooker slash porn star apiece for the weekend. And when I’d ask, But how, darlings? I can’t afford to pay my Balducci’s account, never mind fly to LA and buy hustlers! Mitch would reply, It’s taken care of. Don’t ask how. And Frankie, listening in on the other phone line, would add, Assume it’s an anonymous admirer. That’s always my policy. Rowland thought our jaunts were paid for by burning credit cards stolen by some of the Leo-McKewens’ more louche African-American boyfriends! Whereas Cameron’ – Cameron Powers, another member of the Circle – ‘we were still going together at the time – was certain it was all thanks to some Mafia connection they’d made staying every fall at Mitch’s family place on the Jersey coast. But Cameron was from the hill country of Mississippi and from the minute he hit Manhattan he claimed to see mafiosi everywhere. He used to tell me that when he first moved to New York as a hustler himself, his biggest-tipping customers were what he liked to call Massapequa Tonys and Staten Island Vitos. While we lay in bed, Cam would recall each encounter and describe his Johns’ bodies in extensive detail. Although he may have merely done that from boredom … or even to titillate himself. Whatever am I thinking? You don’t want to hear any hundred-year-old gossip, do you?’

Before I could protest that it was exactly such gossip I wanted to hear, that everyone who was in any way interested in the Purple Circle wanted to hear, Von Slyke stood up, pushed down to either side the shirt that had ridden up his middle and swept off his hat to ruf-flingly hand-comb his hair. ‘Serious as you surely must be, doubtless you’re bored to distraction by an old queen nattering on, and far too polite to ask me to gather my wits and show you into the library, where your real interest in being here lies. You have to forgive me! Puddles’ – Peter? Patrick? What was the name of his current lover? – ‘says I’ve grown so used to those idiots we call fans, and so accustomed to the attentive vacuity of the media always nosing around, I’ve come to assume everyone’s equally grasping and shallow.’ Before I could say a word, Von Slyke had taken off, headed back to the house.

I followed. At one point followed so closely I almost tripped on the surprisingly tightly rooted ground cover of gray-green stems and tiny blue flowers I only at that moment recognized from their overpowering odor must be fresh rosemary. Until now, I’d hadn’t a clue where the herb came from, how it grew, what it looked like, never mind that it had such strong roots and pretty flowers.

We were at the other side of the house, hidden until now in hedges, and Von Slyke stopped and scratched his head. ‘I’m wondering if I locked the library door. Yes, I think I did,’ he replied as I caught up to him, and he lurched off again, this time onto the concrete path that led – as I’d earlier guessed – to the entryway. The whole front of the house was a sweep of adobe laid on so thick it looked like solidified peach ice cream sculpted to scoop up and slide down, to be hollowed out by a doorway here, a window there, a chain of columned nooks and niches. We went under an overhang into a partly covered-over terrace, overgrown with ferns that flourished tempestuously in the abundant coolness. A half-dozen tiny windows gated in wrought-iron abutted on either side a double door; the dark wood carved in arabesques accented by oversized wrought-iron knockers and handles.

Von Slyke flung open the doors and gestured me over a worn alabaster lintel. ‘Welcome to Casa Asunción Maria Estrella Herrera y Lopez,’ he said grandly, adding in a lower voice, ‘That was the name of the Tijuana whore it was originally built for.’

A single long, cool, low-ceilinged corridor floored in blood-red tiles led in either direction to brightly sunlit, high-ceilinged rooms: a venous artery connecting two huge organs. Like the exterior, the interior walls also sported irregular little cave-like openings: one could peer through them into the upper level of a two-story, thick-raftered dining room, approachable only via wrought-iron railed stairways at either end of the corridor.

We headed right, and Von Slyke stopped, turned and stood while I caught up. Still playing tour-guide, he pointed toward the huge dining room with its open-brick fireplace, enormous refectory table, score of chairs along either wall, Viking-ship sideboards dappled in sunlight from multipaned windows with French doors leading to a central terrace.

‘Although this house has seen in its day, I was assured, many, many orgies,’ Von Slyke began, ‘it is said that at one particular party given by the actor George Peppard, now deceased, in the year 1964, when he had leased this house and was possibly the handsomest man in the land, some twenty-two underaged girls from the San Fernando Valley were simultaneously deflowered on that very table, at least five of them personally by their host, wielding, besides his allegedly formidable member, his hands, feet and a variety of garden vegetables, several of which were never recovered.’

He smirked and we ended up laughing together. ‘The house doesn’t look half this big from the outside,’ I said.

‘Like the Peppard petard! But in truth it’s hu-uge! You’ll probably never end up using the wing opposite.’ He pointed beyond the fireplace, where, through an open doorway, I could just make out the pale furnishings of a sitting room. ‘Although naturally you’re welcome to. The West Wing, as we call it here at Casa Herrera y Lopez, contains the formal living room, my sitting room and bedroom – in a tower I languish like Mélisande! The East Wing’ – we’d stopped again and were now looking down another lengthy, dark-tiled corridor which ended, apparently, in mid-air – ‘contains the library, maid’s quarters, closets galore, two lavs and, down those steps, a kitchen, breakfast room, laundry, pantry, and at the end a suite of two guest bedrooms and bath. You’ll probably live there. It opens onto the courtyard, close to the food and the garage. You won’t have to traipse through all this.’

‘I know it’s rude to ask,’ I began, ‘but you bought this house from your royalties, right?’

‘Aren’t you a doll to say that. But the truth is, I couldn’t earn royalties enough to buy this heap if I’d written day and night, lived in a garret and never spent a dime – none of which is even remotely true. No, the very sizable downpayment that allowed me to move in was thanks to the film rights some utterly crazed producer paid for Heliotrope Convertible. What?’ He looked shocked. ‘You didn’t see the movie based on my fourth novel?’ He smiled. ‘Well, sweetie, neither you nor the rest of the universe. But do I care?

‘And this,’ he continued in his tour-guide voice, stopping at the doorway, ‘will be your domain. Or is it demesne? One’s never certain of the usage. Fortunately, here’s a dictionary handy. Several, in fact, in several languages, all of which I profess to know and none of which I really do know, including, unfortunately for my readers, English.’

There are photos of Von Slyke’s library on the back of his last three books, all of them purposely, somewhat campily, in allusion to author shots of earlier times. On DOS: Manuscript in Distress he’s dressed in tweeds and cravat, standing on one book-wall ladder, halfway up, holding open a volume, facing the camera. On the back of Epistle to Albinoni he’s on the corner of his huge Craftsman’s desk, some old album across his lap, his open-necked white shirt and still-blond hair all but glowing in the backlight of the huge window behind. On the cover of Canticle to the Sun he’s upon the Mission-era fainting sofa, his costume satiny black to contrast with the strong patterns of the Lloyd Wright upholstery, one arm languid behind his head, his eyes hooded, his lips puckered in a pout.

So even though I thought I knew the room – and of course Dr St George had spoken of it as ‘possibly the ur-library, the ideal author’s work room’, even so, I wasn’t prepared for how high the bookcases rose to the ceiling on three sides, how rich and fine and how beautifully stained the dark-grained wood was, how many volumes were on those shelves, how their sheer mass managed to dwarf the huge desk, the sofa, almost dwarfed the huge pane of glass flooding it all with sunlight.

While I stood in awe, Von Slyke was already at one wall, going through what I assumed were reference books, muttering, until he looked up. ‘Perch anywhere.

‘Aha! Under demesne with an ee and an es, it says in law, possession, as of one’s own. But formerly – a second definition – it meant the land or estate belonging to a lord, and not rented or let, but kept in his hands. While domain with an o and no s means a land under a single ruler or government.’

‘So technically,’ I summed it up, ‘neither word is correct. Since the house belongs to you, not me. What dictionary is that?’

‘This,’ he patted the worn carmine cover, ‘is my all-time favorite and, it turns out, the oldest dictionary here, and the one I use most. The College Edition of Webster’s New World, copyrighted 1962. A college graduation gift. Not that all of them aren’t good. Oh, except the Random House defines love – the word I use checking out any new dictionary – as quote a strong passion between those of the opposite sex unquote.’

‘A little homophobic?’ I suggested. ‘This place is … well, as described, truly something. Your papers are …?’

Von Slyke stood up, put down the Webster’s, went to the wall of books opposite the window. Reaching behind a few volumes, he must have pressed a button because the entire thing suddenly swung open.

‘Can you believe it!’ he exulted. ‘The moment the real-estate agent showed this to me, I creamed in my jeans! A secret panel behind the bookcase. Every moment of my recent life was as though nil, and my true existence as Nancy Drew could pick up again where I’d dropped it, aged nine and a half, in that humid Midwestern suburb where it is perpetually three o’clock on an August afternoon!’

A little hallway behind the hinged book-wall showed two doors: one led to another – by comparison to this chamber – more modestly sized, inexpensively paneled inner library, maybe eight feet by six, its shelves up to the dropped ceiling filled with ancient long-playing records, peeling paperbacks and, on one wall – I noticed instantly and instantly wanted to get my hands on – dozens of manuscripts inside of and partly peeking out of their rubber-band-shut cardboard boxes, all strewn haphazardly on the shelves amid plastic bags spilling open with letters and envelopes. They didn’t appear to be in order, nor did the scores of hard- and soft-covered notebooks among them, not to mention the stacks of old newspapers, magazines and quarterlies in which I assumed Von Slyke’s work had first appeared excerpted. Equally unarranged seemed the boxes on the floor in front of and blocking the shelves, cartons originally used for Chablis and Volnay and Margaux, now filled to their cracked cardboard brims with what even the most cursory glance told me were typesetting manuscripts and unbound galleys released from the printers.

The other door led to a dainty powder room, with old-fashioned standing porcelain sink and toilet. One odd note: a poster for Ivory Soap, circa 1919, featuring sailors taking a bath onboard some destroyer.

‘Perfect for a sudden whiz,’ Von Slyke said, adding, ‘There’s a full bath with tub and stall shower directly behind this. It opens onto the maid’s room. I seldom use it.’

‘The maid is here all day?’

‘When I’m staying in the house Conchita is in from noon to eight as a rule. She cooks and does light cleaning. For any heavier cleaning she calls in her sister or her daughter to help. I’ll leave checks on the desktop for her to pick up weekly. That’s the way she prefers to be paid.’

‘Then she goes home at night?’

‘To Bell Gardens. It’s only forty-five minutes to an hour, depending on freeway traffic. Occasionally, however, she’ll sleep over. She usually asks if it’s okay beforehand. But there are times she’s asked and I’ve forgotten, and she’s so quiet I don’t remember she’s even in the house until the next morning I wake up and she already has coffee made for me. She’s an absolute doll, and speaks a lot more English than she lets on. I once caught her reading a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel, and when I suggested she might like to read one of mine she said, I appreciate that, but, Mr Von Slyke, your books are all on the Pope’s list of No. Isn’t that heaven? I dined out on it for a month!

‘Do you want to meet her?’ he suddenly asked. ‘You will sooner or later anyway.’ He went to the desk and hit the buttons of an angled unit that I’d earlier supposed was merely a telephone-answering machine, and now had to assume was also an intercom. ‘Conchita. Soy yo, El Jefe.’

Before I could tell him not to bother, Von Slyke said, ‘I could use some coffee. You?’ Then, in response to my nod and a squawk from the intercom, ‘Coffee for two. Coffeemate and sugar substitute. We’re in the library.’ Turning to me, ‘Now that you’ve seen the mess in there, shall we discuss what you’re to do? Maureen – that’s the woman who’s taking the papers – says her people at the Henry