Best-Kept Boy in the World (21 page)

Christmas greetings, to begin with—and to Billy
[Caskey] likewise.

But I am a notable customary Scrooge, and this is to
tell bad pitiful news. Denham is dead—Thursday evening the
16
^th
.

My friend, Bernard Perlin has been staying in the
same pensione; went away to the mountains to make some sketches for
Fortune
, and returning Friday night or Saturday morning,
found Denham’s friend Tony overwhelmed with all the nightmarish
duties, autopsy that day, kindly but bothering police, burial,
etc.—and as of that date had not notified anyone; found no proper
address book, no line of communication to the parents.

So this morning I ... find it in my heart to write
this to you first, saying to myself that it would give you a more
desolate feeling if you heard it still later, still farther
round-about. If it is superfluous, if it seems officious—forgive
me; put it down to my own sorrowfulness, not great but true &
peculiar, of the many years, fourteen years.

Note that it was not the worst death—he went to the
bathroom and did not return, ten or fifteen minutes passed—he had
fallen to the floor; apparently a simple and instant heart
failure.
¹³

As he wrote to Isherwood, and a day or two later
when he wrote in his journal, Wescott pondered the news, for “I was
one of the first of the elders-edifiers-influencers in his accursed
life,”
¹⁴
having instructed him in the art of attracting
the right admirers. For the fourteen years he had known him,
Wescott had always been vaguely troubled by the role he had played
in Denham’s life. In his letter to Christopher, Glenway began to
ruminate about his first encounters with Denny:

Come to think of it, I know what impels me to write
to you. When we spoke of him that evening at Lincoln’s [Kirstein],
it gave me goose-flesh—as in the ancient sense of the word, panic—I
told you then, didn’t I? How he used to come to me, in the spring
of 1934, and inquire (as of a like but elder Rubempre or Rastignac)
how to pursue his fortune, how to maneuver his youth in the great
world—and oh, what was ever great about it! And though I would
wring my hands at concepts of himself & of life overall already
fixed in his stubborn young head, though I would mildly scold and
altruistically argue, I have always looked back on it uneasily,
wondering . . .

Glenway was able to end his account with a report
that, to the end, Denny was Denny:

Bernard met him for the first time there in the
Pensione Foggette—and you will be pleased to know that he speaks of
him as “very gentle, sweet, and for the better as for the worse,
not grown-up.”
¹⁵

Denny had left no address book, but the word began
to spread: after a lifetime of living way beyond the edge, Denham
had died of a malformed heart, a ticking time bomb that could have
taken him at any time.

Still in Rome, Johnny Goodwin was mystified and
saddened. “I can’t say what made Denny click. I can only say what
his effect was on other people. He had great, great charm, and you
always had the feeling that potentially he was something much more
than he was.”
¹⁶
Bill Harris, who had known Denny in
California, said of Denny that “he thought that the world was made
up of whores. To be a successful whore was all, he said. Though he
didn’t brag, he felt he had done pretty well at
it.”
¹⁷

Peter Watson learned the news by telegram from Rome.
On December 20, he wrote to Waldemar Hansen: “My own feelings are
so mixed that I cannot begin to express them in a letter.” A week
later, a few days before he was to sail for the United States, he
again wrote to Hansen as the news took hold of him: “Denham’s death
has affected me rather deeply. Please be very patient with me
because I shall arrive in a very depressed
condition.”
¹⁸

After seeing to Denny’s burial, Tony Watson-Gandy
packed up his belongings from the apartment he shared with Denny
and, with Trotsky, returned to England to his family’s estate.

Denny was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
He would have been delighted with the company. John Keats, the
young English poet, had come to Rome in 1820, seeking a cure from
tuberculosis, and there, long “before my pen has glean’d my teeming
brain,” died the next year at the age of twenty-five. His tombstone
identified him only as a “YOUNG ENGLISH POET.” Despairing over the
critical reception of his poems, Keats had asked there be inscribed
on his stone these words: “Here lies One whose Name was writ in
Water.” No name need have been inscribed, for his output in an
eighteen month period of white-hot inspiration before his death
secured his position as an immortal, and forever after, visitors
have come to the Protestant Cemetery, a place of pilgrimage, to pay
homage. Indeed, when in Rome in the Spring of 1877, Oscar Wilde had
an audience with Pope Pius IX, and later the same day visited the
Protestant Cemetery. It was this cemetery, not the Vatican, that he
called “the holiest place in Rome,” for here lay the remains of
that “divine boy,” John Keats. Wilde fell to his knees in reverence
in front of the headstone, something he had not done at the
Vatican.
¹⁹

Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his preface to “Adonais,”
his long elegy to his fallen friend, wrote a year after Keats died
that “it might make one in love with death to know that one should
be buried in so sweet a place.” And buried there Shelley was the
following year, when this other young English Romantic poet drowned
on July 8, 1822 while sailing in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia off
Livorno, Tuscany.

Keats. Shelly. Richard Henry Dana, the author of
Two Years Before the Mast
. Antonio Gramsci, the founder of
the Italian Communist party. Here on this hilly five acre oasis off
the Via Ciao Cesio, near Porta San Paola, surrounded in part by a
section of the forty foot high Aurelian Wall built in the third
century to keep the barbarians from Rome, shadowed by the
ninety-foot, marble-clad pyramid built in the first century by the
Roman magistrate Gaius Cestus, who was enthralled with all things
Egyptian, here, amid the ancient Mediterranean cypress and pines,
lay sculptors, artists, a Beat generation poet, philosophers,
diplomats.

Today, the gray walls that “moulder round,” as
Shelley wrote, dim the bustle of the city, the noise of traffic and
trains and the nearby factories and car repair shops of the
Testaccio district. Cats scamper and drape themselves over grieving
marble angels or doze on headstones or lead the occasional visitor
around the paths of this dreamy, lush sanctuary with the look of an
Italian garden with its overgrown flowering trees and shrubs and
crumbling Victorian monuments.

Michael Wishart found himself ringing the bell for
the custodian at the gates of the Protestant Cemetery. He had come
to say goodbye to his friend who had brought “pure
joy”
²⁰
to his life, who had given him the happiest days,
weeks, and months he would ever experience. As he wandered alone
along the forlorn paths, he saw none of the evocative beauty of the
spot which had so entranced Shelley. To Michael, it was bleak and
forbidding, with the old cypress trees casting cold shadows over
Denny’s grave, a grave which seemed to him “forsaken, separated
from the rest.”
²¹
The United States Consulate had been
unable to locate any family member when Denny died in Rome, and so
paid for his burial in the south side of the cemetery, near the
grave of Keats.
²²

Michael stared at that twenty-three inch by forty
inch marble headstone:

LOUIS DENHAM FOUTS + 16 DEC. 1948

“The sight of his name chiseled into stone made me
feel violently sick. I tried to visualize what remained, a mere few
metres beneath my feet. What had become of the scorpion tattooed in
his groin that I had kissed so many times?”
²³
And as he
looked and remembered and heard in the breeze through the cypress
his deep Southern drawl—we had fun, didn’t we? those were good
times—Michael wished he could lay a blanket of primroses over the
grave, just as, so many times before, he had pulled the covers up
to Denny’s chin.

Like the ghost of Jimmie Trimble, Denny’s presence
always hovered about those who had loved him.

Glenway Wescott in early March of 1949 traveled to
California for a short vacation and stayed in a hotel in Santa
Monica close to Christopher Isherwood’s home. After a visit with
Isherwood, Wescott wrote to praise a manuscript of his he had just
finished reading, adding to his letter a parenthetical: “(By the
way, sorry to have aroused your grief about D.—how ever did I
happen to?—sorry, sorry. But no regret—you must sometimes grieve
uninhibitedly—let blood wash the cut.)”
²⁴

Later that month, Peter Watson visited Christopher
Isherwood, and Christopher and Bill Caskey took Peter to a bar “the
Gala, because it was such a haunt of Denny’s. It was almost empty,
and very sad.”
²⁵

When Dylan Thomas was in California in December of
1953 to give a reading at UCLA, he stopped to visit Isherwood.
“When I showed him my workroom, he at once noticed Denny’s
photograph on the wall and said respectfully, ‘He’s very
beautiful.’ I felt quite sorry that I had to explain the mistake,”
Christopher noted in his diary.
²⁶

Two years later, on November 14, 1955, “the most
marvelous Indian summer” day, Christopher stopped in Tivoli during
his travels through Italy. “We went to Denny’s grave in the
Protestant Cemetery,” he wrote in his diary, “and I cried. It all
seemed such a wretched tangle—his life, and mine too. I’m depressed
here ...Europe, in its autumn, reminds me of my own. And I seem to
myself to look older every day. And I feel no ripening, no
resignation. I don’t want to get old or die.”
²⁷

Four years later, on November 16, 1959, Isherwood
had lunch with Aldous Huxley who told Christopher about taking
mescaline and the spiritual experiences it promoted. One involved a
dream about Denny, which he described. “He saw Denny naked, on a
horse. Riding along a precipice road, bounded by a cliff. There was
a door in the cliff, into a cave. The horse threw Denny and he
banged through the door and fell into the cave. He was very badly
hurt. One of his legs twitched uncontrollably. He crawled back out
of the cave on to the road and collapsed. Aldous was bending over
him with extreme concern and compassion; then Aldous
woke.”
²⁸

But Denny remained more real than a presence in
ephemeral conversations and memories and dreams. He never did write
his memoirs, but in living his life on his own terms he created a
work of art that inspired others.

Michael Wishart knew that Denny was pleased to have
been the inspiration for a character in Somerset Maugham’s novel
The Razor’s Edge
, Sophie, “the hopelessly self-destructive
opiumaniac drunken girl”;
²⁹
Wishart noted that the
novelist “had been fascinated by Denham” and modeled this character
who bought her opium in Toulon, just as Denny did, after him, “of
which Denham was strangely proud.”
³⁰
No doubt, he would
have been proud, too, that his best friend, Christopher Isherwood,
immortalized him as Paul in
Down There on a Visit
, that Gore
Vidal, who had known him for but a few weeks, had preserved him in
amber in
The Judgment of Paris
and as Elliott in “Pages From
an Abandoned Journal,” that Truman Capote was so captivated by him
to bring him to life as himself in “Unspoiled Monsters.” Denny had
exchanged what he realized was the fleetingness of mortality for
the eternity of art, continuing to live on with an actuality
greater than most people had while alive.

Like Ulysses in Tennyson’s poem, Denny well
understood how “that which we are, we are.” Like the Greek hero, he
had drunk life to the lees: “All times I have enjoyed/Greatly, have
suffered greatly, both with those/That loved me, and alone.” And
with the ancient wanderer, he too, could say that “always roaming
with a hungry heart/Much have I seen and known.”

Like Ulysses, Denham Fouts had “become a name.”

“I am a part of all that I have met,” Tennyson wrote
of Ulysses. Denny became a part of everyone who knew him. And to
become a part of a writer is perhaps as close to immortality as
anyone can get.

FOREWORD

1. Vidal,
Palimpsest
, p. 180, p. 179.

2. Clarke,
Capote
, p. 173.

3. Rorem,
A Ned Rorem Reader
, p. 275.

4. Clarke, pp. 171-172.

5. Vidal, p. 180. Plimpton,
Truman Capote
, p.
88.

6. Clarke, p. 172.

7. Wishart,
High Diver
, p. 52.

8. Clarke, p. 172.

CHAPTER ONE

1. Shelden,
   Friends of Promise
   , p. 180, p.
   29.
   

2. Shelden, p. 132.

3. Lewis,
Cyril Connolly
, p. 395.

4. Shelden, p. 133.

5. Lewis, p. 395.

6. Wishart,
High Diver
, p. 18.

7. Ibid., p. 21.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 19.

10. Ibid., p. 22.

11. Ibid.

12. Spender,
World Within World
, p. 266.

13. Wishart, p. 25.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. 49.

16. Ibid., p. 50.

17. Ibid. pp. 50-51.

18. Ibid., p. 51.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p. 52.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., p. 53.