GLR May-June 2023

been outside of Morocco. Along the way, Chester also became fluent in Maghrebi Arabic, which he felt had enormous similar ities to the Hebrew he learned as a boy. Chester’s years in Morocco covered two important phases in his life. The first coincided with his writing of Exquisite Corpse , which wasn’t published until 1967, long after he’d left Tangier. This is a significant if overlooked work. The other phase marked his final decline into psychosis. The two seem related. He had his first psychotic break, which Jane Bowles called “The Acci dent,” just as he began Exquisite Corpse . He recovered enough to finish the novel, but then the psychosis returned. His mental condition was not helped by his smoking, drinking, pill-pop ping, and consumption of large quantities of kif (cannabis). The last pages of Exquisite Corpse are filled with his paranoid delu sions and hallucinations, which haunted him for the rest of his life. After leaving Morocco, which forbade his return, he wan dered from country to country, ending up in Jerusalem, to which all Jews, no matter how crazy, have a right of return. But even at his craziest, Chester is brilliant. To be sure, his self-destructive concerns about his career become something of a bore, but who is without such albatrosses? There are also the remarkable passages early on in the collection. In November of 1963, before madness has sunk its teeth deep into him, he writes to Harriet Zwerling: “Every night I wake up sweating and shak ing and trembling, and with a start I ask myself: Who am I? It’s only this question that gives continuity to my life and identity to my being. Only when I ask myself who am I, do I have any idea who I am. I am he who doesn’t know who he is. If I suddenly did know who I was, I would no longer know who I was.” In March 1964, on the publication of his book BeholdGo liath, he told Field: “to my surprise, I feel Alfred Chester is me and that I can be Alfred Chester and my father’s son.” But his euphoria was short-lived. Two months later, he declared: “I am another person. Or finally no one. My sense of waiting, of ex pectation is over. My past belongs to someone else, some ro mantic madman, Who am I? The question doesn’t exist. I am what happens.” By July, he reported: “there is really something profoundly wrong with me that refuses to let me have my own unified voice.” This sense of the splitting up of the self is at the core of schizophrenia. As he descended more deeply into madness, he developed Capgras Syndrome, the belief that people have been replaced by other people who look and sound exactly like the prototype. To Edward Field he wrote in September 1965: “I don’t even be lieve you are writing your letters. ... Are you really Edward? And how can I know?” That same week he wrote to Norman Glass: “I don’t know who you are really. Sometimes I think you’re an actor hired to play Norman Glass who doesn’t exist. Sometimes I think you are that psychiatrist you wrote to.” In one of Alfred Chester’s last letters, written as he’s prepar ing to leave Morocco and return to New York, he writes Edward Field: “I have decided that you love me and I’m not going to change my mind about it again. ... I keep accusing [Dris] of being a spy, but even if he is, he has made me happier than any of the devoted nonspies I ever lived with. So can I really com plain? And whatever has gone on, I have been happier here than I ever was before.” Funny, gossipy and heartbreaking, these are some of the great American letters. May–June 2023

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