by CONAN LAI for Urbane Magazine
Illustration is an ‘exquisite corpse’, a drawing created by multiple artists.
The Exquisite Corpse is a novel published in 1986 by the late Alfred Chester, thought it retains an air of timelessness even in the new century. The openly homosexual tones of Chester’s writings are no longer taboo, but the raw emotion of the book is still very relevant.
Chester’s personality helped shape this masterpiece. Due to constant x-ray treatments as a child, he was left permanently bald, wearing a wig in public. The social rejection of his physical appearance made him a very withdrawn child, allowing his writing to be deeply introspective. Studying English and eventually attending Columbia University for a graduate degree, he began contributing to prominent literary publications. After releasing his first novel titled Jamie is my Heart’s Desire, he found critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. This afforded him the luxury of living and writing around in the world, including his favourite home, Morocco. While living there, his mental health
began its tragic deterioration. The writing of The Exquisite Corpse was completed before his insanity drove him to destruction, and this presents the reader with a gripping story that takes them to the edges of madness, while still remaining somewhat grounded in reality. Chester went on to die in 1971 in Jerusalem of drug overdose, in an attempt to escape his condition. It wasn’t until 1986 that his editor Diana Athill published his last great novel, an almost visceral narrative that came to be called The Exquisite Corpse.
Approaching The Exquisite Corpse without prior knowledge of the novel, or its eccentric author, can be jarring experience. The first few chapters are engaging with their ambiguous characters and a sense of sexual tension, but almost immediately, you are caught in the midst of “watery turds every which way around the room”. This marks the transition of the narrative from the merely mysterious to the truly sublime. Like Gore Vidal before him, Alfred Chester explores sexual deviancy in a very direct way. However, it does not come across as an attempt to shock or offend the reader. The scenes with sex slave James Madison, who hasn’t been outside his ‘cell’ for months, unfold in such a casual manner that the reader can’t help but accept the supposed normalcy of this characters life. There is no prejudice, no condemnation in Chester’s writing; all of the characters are written about in this way. We are introduced to Mary Poorpoor, whose child is taken away by a fairy, and Tomtom Jim, a sort of modern-day Noah, wandering the Earth for humans to feed to his animals. It’s soon
apparent that the “sparkling and glamorous world” of The Exquisite Corpse is not the Earth, though it feels eerily like home.
It would do the book no justice to attempt to summarise the plot, simply because even after finishing the book, the reader is left dumbfounded. The book reads as a series of loosely connected scenes and characters, and it takes careful consideration to realize how it all works together. The characters are prone to changing names and genders randomly throughout the story, and a second reading certainly helps. However, the real magic of the book is that it draws the reader in and doesn’t let go. The characters live in the Big Apple, and travel the world, but the whole time there is a very intimate feeling, and the world that Alfred Chester creates engulfs the reader. This is partly because Chester’s writing is brilliant and playful. The lack of pretension is welcome, and fitting of the book’s content. But the simple explanation is that the story is breathtaking. A particular scene with a mysterious sailor with a never-ending dick and a woman with a “volcano rumbling between her thighs” will leave the reader speechless. Written like an uber-sexual fable and a roadmap to the secret compulsions of humankind all rolled into the one, The Exquisite Corpse is a gem of a book, poignantly written and disturbingly engaging.
