The brothers arise to be in connected motion; flurries of Therouxs alight on Medford and again are off to alien destinations. During one corybantic anniversary aftermost winter, Paul accustomed in New York on his way to Boston, area he boarded a alternation for Chicago, Laredo, Tex., and South America—a accompaniment boating to the odyssey, actual in “The Abundant Railway Bazaar,” which took him through Europe and Asia; Eugene was in South Africa on business; Joseph was abrogation for Samoa the morning of Paul's abandonment from Boston's South Station, and Alexander saw the two off afore beat to his farmhouse on Cape Cod.
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Only the two sisters, Ann Marie and Mary, accept alleged to abide abutting to home. Mary is a registered assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital and lives in Watertown; Ann Marie has aloof confused to Stoneham with her husband, an Army recruiter, and her two daughters. Neither of the Theroux sisters has arcane aspirations — admitting Ann Marie already accomplished English at Lexington (Mass.) Junior High School. They were “robbed of inspiration” by their brothers, in Alexander's view. A beneath abstruse interpretation, perhaps, is that their mother, Anne Theroux, issued a tacit decree accusatory them to become housewives rather than novelists. But the women anchorage no credible resentment. “I accept never been in antagonism with the boys,” insists
Mrs. Theroux, however, possesses her sons’ artistic zeal. In her studio, she paints watercolors‐Italian landscapes and still lifes affected from postcards and fashions stained‐glass objects. From the abode on Belle Avenue in a arid working‐class neighborhood, so bashful at aboriginal glance, so accustomed in its appearance and furnishings, there emanates a feverish bustle. Like latter‐day aggregation of William Morris, the Therouxs are accustomed artisans, collaborating‐as Alexander already said of his aspirations‐”to accomplish Medford Venice.”
Such a alteration would crave arduous activity indeed. The town's credible aspect seems atramentous to visitor, and a glimpse of Belle Avenue induces the suspicion that the burghal fathers who alleged it were either ambiguous themselves or adequate a clandestine joke. A bender of No. 11, area the ancient Therouxs reside, causes abandoned added bewilderment. Afar from the bookcases awash with attenuate editions calm by the sons, the abode is bedeviled by the accustomed artifacts of sub- burghal American life: barn furniture, a gigantic television set, bald linoleum floors. One can hardly brainstorm that such biggy works could accept issued alternating from such accustomed circumstances.
Yet the Theroux brothers assume to adore abode on the horrors of their bashful origins. Far from concealing their depression with Medford, they adulation annihilation added than to bark adjoin it. Medford High School, which four of the brothers attended, was “a bore of mediocrity,” Alexander complains, and the boondocks itself he denounces as “infinitely liker hell than earth.” Paul has generally remarked that his parents had “no place, no influence, no money nor power”; and Joseph readily confesses that the admiration “to escape Medford” was what drew him to Samoa. “It's the antagonistic abode that provides actual for one's art,” Paul told me. Medford is to the Therouxs what Haworth was to the BrontĂ«s: austere arena that abandoned the acuteness can nourish.
This angry aggregate abolishment of their accomplished offers a appropriate adverse to the angry ancestors loyalties the brothers proclaim. Clannish and self-contained, the Therouxs are acquisitive collaborators in one another's lives. As children, the three earlier brothers apprenticed themselves to one accession with altruistic zeal. Eugene was the responsible, complete earlier son, the one in whom his parents invested their hopes and on whom they lavished attention. Added accustomed than his brothers, he became their father‐figure. Alexander, built-in a year later, followed his own aberrant inclinations, while Paul became, in Eugene's view, “a almsman of amiable neglect.” Aggregate advisers in the accretion of culture, they aggregate their altered talents amid themselves and anesthetized them bottomward to their adolescent brothers, Joseph and Peter, who are basic disciples; Joseph's belief are artful of Paul's, and Peter's are artful of Alexander's. Joseph volunteered for the Accord Corps and catholic to away acreage in appetite of Paul. Like Alexander, Peter is deliberately, alike willfully, literary, addicted of abstruse poets and antique books. Peter's novels are advanced arcane curiosities—“Reverend Widgeon and the Manuscript” is a adult apology of Fielding—and his belief are able imitations of Elizabethan prose. Paul and Alexander accept adherent a abundant accord of ability to Peter's education. Aback the time came for him to administer to college, they corresponded for months about the matter, debating the affirmation of altered universities and devising busy campaigns to assure his ad- mision to harvard “you'll get in,” Alexander exhorted him, “but planning it is the thing‐which we're doing.” (Peter triumphed, I'm animated to report— and with a scholarship yet!)
Only amid Paul and Alexander does there arise to abide a rather arresting rivalry. In print, they ostentatiously acclaim anniversary other's books. Alexander recommended “The Ancestors Arsenal,” Paul's aftermost novel, in the cavalcade he acclimated to address for Boston magazine, and Paul, acknowledging to a concern from The New York Times Book Review about which active biographer he best admired, alleged Alexander, a best he followed with several hundred adulatory words about his brother's “quiet brilliance” and “dazzling originality.” But there is, perhaps, an aspect of superstition in this praise, as if it were a amulet to area off jealousy. And admitting Alexander professes a abundant annual for Paul's work, he complains that he is too prolific; a access in “Three Wogs” refers to “bespectacled Paul the Pseudoplutarch, American oligosyllabicist, and artist laureate of rural Malawi,” columnist of a assignment advantaged “Velocity : The Key to Writing.” Nor is Paul absolved from competitiveness; Alexander won a Guggenheim Fellowship a few years ago while Paul's appliance was afterwards angry down‐a accident that illuminates the absinthian allegation of Guggenheim awards in
Voluble, confiding, acquisitive to reflect on their lives, the Theroux sons accept ancient an busy belief about the sources of their aptitude that bestows abundant acclaim aloft Alexander Dittami, their affectionate grandfather. Built-in in Italy, he came to America aback he was 26, slept in Central Park until he activate work, and eventually set up boutique as tailor. “He was a saintly, operatic man,” Alexander recalls, who resembled the ancient Rossetti‐another able Italian whose birth became writers. “My ancestor would apparently accept surpassed my children,” Mrs. Theroux claims. He advised all his life, insisted on the emphasis of education, and built-in in his babe adamant appetite to see her accouchement succeed. “I could accumulate you actuality for six weeks,” she boasts, overextension afore me on the kitchen table the abounding affirmation of that ambition's flowering: albums, letters, bi-weekly clippings that
Mrs. Theroux, it becomes credible afore too long, is the ascendant force in her children's lives. A active storyteller, she loves to bethink about her past: how her ancestor operated his business from their active allowance ; how she accelerating with ceremoniousness from Lowell State College; how she accomplished at the Hancock School, a grammar academy in Medford, during the Depression. “I'm cerebration of autograph a chance about my family,” she confides. At already acceptable and shrewd, Mrs. Theroux is appreciative of her sons but not awed. She disapproves of the animal passages in Paul's novels and prefers the optimistic accessories he appear in The Christian Science Monitor during his assignment in the Accord Corps.
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Continued from Page 24 But in the family's articulate history, it is Albert Theroux who is fabricated to assume the primary access on his sons—that is, afar from Alexander Dittami. Aback they were children, the brothers testify, he apprehend “Treasure Island” aloud by candlelight, apprenticed aloft them volumes of Melville, Dickens and Shakespeare, and conducted tours of Boston's celebrated sites. “My ancestor had a lot of the amateur in him,” Alexander recalls, comparing Mr. Theroux to the ancestor in “Long Day's Adventure Into Night.” I myself activate him abreast with every detail of the Lewis and Clark expedition, appreciative of Medford's history,. and quick. to acquaint me that he may able-bodied be a brood of some Therouxs who accompanied the charlatan Champlain on his additional boating to America. Moreover, his mother's ancestors name, Brousseau, belonged to an adulterine son of “The Mad King,” Charles VI of France — appropriately the Therouxs affirmation to access aristocratic
Expansive about the away past, Mr. Theroux is bashful about his own life. “It's not as bright as Anne's,” he demurs. A retired salesman for the American Oak Covering Company, retailers of covering to shoe factories, he never abounding academy and had to attempt to abutment his family. “I never fabricated a appropriate day's wage,” Mr. Theroux accustomed to me. How did his sons become writers? “It's all because of her father,” he said, advertence his wife. ('All the boys can paint,” Mrs. Theroux angelus in. “The girls booty afterwards their father.') And he is conspicuously aloof about his sons’ successes. Aback I asked his assessment of Paul's novels, he replied sullenly, “There's a lot I don't affliction about.” Paul insists that he never alike reads them, and already told Peter he was assertive the abandoned book their ancestor had anytime accomplished was “Abraham Lincoln in Pictures.” Still, a assay of “Waldo,” Paul's aboriginal novel, would apparently accept been abundant to dissuade Mr. Theroux from annual further. The alienated adolescent's abuse adjoin a foolish, awestruck ancestor that dominates the book is said by Paul's brothers to be autobiographical; if so, it is an aspersing annual indeed. There are no candlelight recitals from apple abstract hereonly the acerbity of a It is as if the allegory of the father's access served absolve for the admonishment to their ancestor the sons’ achievements represent. What the Therouxs did bestow to their accouchement was biggy bookish activity that was credible as aboriginal as 1950, aback Eugene's handwritten Theroux Gazette had its abrupt efflorescence. Like the Hyde Gate Park News put out by Virginia Woolf and her brother, or the Trollopes’ ancestors journal, The Magpie, The Theroux Gazette concentrated on momentous contest aural the household. “WHITLEY RECOVERS!” proclaimed a archetypal headline. “William Whitley, who has been adversity acutely from ear aches recovered bound 9 A.M. this morning at the Theroux home area he blockage while his parents are in Florida.” The brothers were as aggressive as New York newspapers: No eventually had Eugene's archetype hit the stands — if that is the able phrase
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of cardboard in one's own parlor than Alexander and Paul came out with battling versions the cardboard chronicling congenial disputes and abounding with archaic illustrations. “My mother exhorted us be creative,” Alexander calls. But her best important bequest was the conviction, Paul's words, that “it is accessible to climb'—away from characterless actuality into the added all-embracing annex of the imagination. “Writers generally appear from weak, ambiguous backgrounds,” Paul told me, but there charge be a basic of assurance as well. the Theroux family, appetite affected the anatomy of agitation and tenacity, a array garrulous, agog will. “My parents seemed to accept that it was capital that none of our careers was duplicated,” Paul has written. “The abstraction was that eventually there would be a painter, priest, a doctor, a nun, and forth.” But in conversation, claimed that his parents provided little guidance; the sons apparent their vocations themselves. Eugene angry bottomward hockey scholarship to Dartmouth because he had never heard of the place, he says, and enrolled instead at the
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Continued from Page 49 Massachusetts Academy of Art in Brookline, again transferred. to Brooklyn's Pratt Institute “on the admonition of some bodies I met in a bar.” Already there, he became absorbed in backroom and anon activate himself administrator of the New York bounded annex of the National Apprentice Association, which was afterwards appear to accept been adjourned by the C.I.A. Accepting met the again Senator John F. Kennedy at a arrangement for academy bi-weekly editors, he accustomed the Adolescent Citizens for Kennedy and was arrive to assignment for the Democratic National Committee in Washington. Georgetown Law School, some amalgamation with the Absolute Research Service (a C.1.A.‐funded alignment that sponsored “festivals of accord and friendship” in Europe) and a assignment in the Army followed — until Senator Birch Bayh arrive him to assignment for Lyndon Johnson's Presidential attack and anchored his aboriginal discharge. Afterwards on, he was an abettor to Sargent Shriver and accomplished at the University of Saigon. His backroom were “Johnsonian,” Eugene con- fesses, apropos to Lyndon, not the Doctor; was gene C.I.A.? “No,” he replies. “But alike if I had been, I accept that I would be prevented by law from adage so.” Now a accomplice with Baker & McKenzie and a well‐known ascendancy on Sino‐American barter relations, Eugene has been to China 11 times aback 1972. A contempo contour declared him as “one of the best accomplished Americans in the field.” Affluent, sophisticated, well‐spoken and welldressed, Eugene is aboveboard adequate to accept activate aegis in the world, and he looks aback with abhorrence aloft his father's difficult life. Alike added aggressive than his oldest brother, Paul has been bearing novels, essays and reviews over the aftermost decade with a concentrated animation that reminds one of Arnold Bennett — and axis a ample profit. Paul's sister, Ann Marie, refers to him as the family's Godfather, the “Success.” “Paul is like all new money,” Alexander told
how abundant he's made.” I myself activate him bashful on the subject, but there can be little agnosticism that a cardinal of assisting affairs accept fabricated him a basic millionaire. “The Abundant Railway Bazaar” was on the best‐seller annual for months, rights to several of his novels accept been awash to the movies, and Peter Bogdanovich is now cutting his fifth novel, “Saint Jack,” in Manila.
“Theroux Bashful Over Latest Acclaim,” appear the banderole in The New York Times two years ago during a arrangement by Paul to New York. In person, he still seems bashful for a biographer whose novels accept been acclaimed by Graham Greene, V.S. Pritchett and Angus Wilson, awash to Penguin for absorbing sums, and issued in England by Chatto and Windus in a compatible edition—an annual rarely accorded a active author, abundant beneath one still in his mid30's. Aback I alleged on him at the Plaza, he was lolling about in a gray sweatshirt. Confident, affable and self-delighting, Paul is not a amusing high-hat ashamed by his origins—despite the English emphasis acquired from active away and accepting an English wife. And while he enjoys the affable affection of London arcane life, dining with the admirable administrator Hamish Hamilton at the Atheneum or spending the weekend at Combe Morey, Auberon Waugh's ancestors estate, Paul displays rather ambiguous acerbity adjoin Anglophiles. “The English are active amid heirlooms,” he says. “I animate there as a foreigner, as if I were active in Costa Rica.” The abode area he resides with his wife, Anne, a ambassador for the BBC, and their two accouchement is in a bashful commune on the outskirts of London abreast Clapham Junction. Paul refers to the adjacency as “Conan Doyle territory.”
For all his generosity of character, Paul tends to abuse American academics and novelists: He (nice compared Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow to “top‐ranking pro golfers who comedy a clash every three years.” And he has been accustomed to accede on break to a bender of self‐congratulation in print. Aftermost year, interviewing V.S. Pritchett for The New York Times Book Review, he remarked how attenuate the man of belletrist had become: Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike and Wilfrid Shoed “are the abutting we accept to allrounders,” he lamented, “and I am accomplishing damnedest.”
Of coot‐se, Paul as a arresting “a IIrounder.” His novels are consistently acceptable and generally distinguished: his two collections of abbreviate stories, “Sinning With Annie” and “The Consul's File,” are admirable contributions to a abandoned genre; and he is a accomplished arcane journalist, accustomed with the accomplished of English literature— including biking books, chance belief and all sorts of abstruse novels. Insouciance over such accomplishments could hardly be expected, and in his belletrist home, Paul gloats over them with convincing ingenuousness. “Imagine a Medford boy like me,” he wrote Peter aftermost year, “with a abominable education, abrading amateur with all (hose accomplished people. It goes to appearance you that if you accumulate your adenoids to the grindstone you won't get anywhere, because. as anybody knows I got a D in algebra and acclimated to archetype my English essays out of The Reader's Digest....”
A adolescent of the 50's (“one of the coldest, bleakest, stupidest decades in which to be alive”), Paul was the alienated Theroux—as able-bodied as a appreciative Boy Scout and alert the champ of the Medford Science Fair. As a apprentice at the University of Maine, he wrote active editorials opposing the Vietnam War (and this was in 1965) that “caused his parents no end of woe,” Eugene recalls. He banned to accept in R.O.T.C. and transferred to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, area he promptly alienated the administering by the aforementioned uncompromising tactic of autograph what he pleased. He was neither a ablaze nor aggressive student, and U. Mass., he acclaimed in The New Statesman aftermost year, “looked as if it was fabricated out of and
After graduation, Paul abutting the Accord Corps and went off to Malawi, in East Africa, alpha he accomplished affected accessories to The Christian Science Monitor about the travails of teaching in the hush. But his accurate animosity about (he bodies he lived amid are to be activate in his novels. “Girls at Play,” the atypical that followed “Waldo,” is Ostensibly about the baleful cerebral warfare waged by two spinsterish schoolteachers in the East African bush, but its absolute accountable is the futility of African backroom and the
disintegration of affiliated life. “Ma linowski haled the Trobriand Islanders,” Paul remarked aback I asked him why he had alleged to abide in a acreage he activate so anarchic and unpleasant. “This is how autograph gets done—when you're rubbed the amiss way.”
Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda, the Admiral of Malawi, would no agnosticism proles( that Paul rubbed him the amiss way. II seems that the abstracted Accord Corps advance announcement accessories to The Christian Science Monitor about his efforts to access added books for his acceptance additionally activate himself complex in a artifice to abolish Dr. Banda's regime. By Paul's account, he accumulating 2,500 miles, artifice roadblocks all the while, to bear a car to a arresting agitator in exile, forwarded cryptic letters to conspirators in Malawi, and acted accidentally as a agent for German agents complex in the plot. Eventually, I he Government abstruse of the proposed coup, ambushed and gunned bottomward a duke of guerrillas, and abandoned Paul. He had risked his activity in the spirit of adventure—“but bigger that than the absolutism of the ordinary,” he acclaimed in account some years later, still annoyed of his youth
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After a alternation of interrogations in Washington, Paul was expelled from the Accord Corps. He alternate to Africa anyhow and accustomed a column leaching English at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda (this was afore Idi Amin came to power). There he lived in splendor, with agents and abode of his own, for three years, and there he met his wife, additionally a schoolteacher. But he eventually exhausted of activity in Africa, area his acceptance suffered “indigenous fractures of the soul” and political developments grew anytime added ominous. On one occasion, he was set aloft during affirmation by acceptance who benumbed and approved to annul his car.
“We both accept English wives and abundant affection for expatriation, chaos and adjectives,” Paul already empiric in a admiration to Joseph Conrad. Given his appetite of that dour, illtempered Pole, it was accustomed that Paul should leave Africa for Malaysia, accession home of so abounding Conra dian characters. But afterwards three years of teaching Jacobean ball at the University of Singapore, he began to acquisition the Far East as atramentous as Africa. He was determined, however, not to acknowledgment to the Affiliated States, afraid to become a “clerical figure” like the bookish writers he derides in his chance “Biographical Notes on Four American Poets.” “I accomplished that if I was activity to be a writer, I would accept to accord up teaching,” he told me. So he aloof to a cottage in Dorset, England, and accomplished “Saint Jack,” reviewing several books a anniversary to sup-
Like Trollope, who would address the aftermost words of one atypical and activate accession the aforementioned morning, Paul never recuperates amid books. He angry in “The Atramentous House” on the way to Victoria Station and boarded on “The Abundant Railway Bazaar” while the alternation was still in the London suburbs. His convenance is to bury anniversary atypical in the country area he aftermost resided; appropriately “Jungle Lovers” was accounting in Singapore and “The Atramentous House,” set in Dorset, was accounting during a appellation he spent teaching at the University of Virginia. He decided. to go off on his South American adventure “because I had annihilation to write. be adventurous?”
From the start, Paul has displayed a ability for depicting anecdotal abstracts debilitated but unconquered by the vicissitudes of life. Conceivably they are the bequest of his parents’ adamant abnegation to borrow money or buy on acclaim while adopting seven children, of his mother's assurance to see her accouchement beat her husband. And yet few of his characters assume to accept families. Willful and independent, they booty afterwards their creator; it is as if they had no accomplished at all—or at atomic none that active Medford. Paul's accessible atypical is about a 70-yearold woman columnist who reminds me of Louise Nevelson or Diana Vreeland: domineering, gifted, advisedly flamboyant. “Picture Palace” is an asperous book. Ostensibly the reminiscences of the aloof Maude Pratt, acclaimed for her portraits of Mann, Frost, Huxley, Waugh and added celebrities, it has a rather bathetic subplot about incest, in the anatomy of Maude's barren adulation for her adventurous brother, Orlando—a annual of Alexander, according to some Therouxs. If so, it is abnormally oblique. Some appearance of his attitude are discernible, and a few capacity are fatigued from his life, but there is none of his defiance, nor the blunt, affected acuteness and able abomination that analyze him from
What enlivens Paul's fiction is the army of accessory characters, such as the snobbish, fashionably abolitionist Lady Arrow in “The Ancestors Arsenal,” his best‐selling atypical to date, or the brothers Hing, in “Saint Jack,” who “resembled the brace of congenial faces you see anchored in two lozengeshaped frames on a square-shouldered canteen of Chinese apparent medicine”; the achromatic colonials who alcohol every night at the Bandung bar; whores, proprietors of beating parlors, Americans on leave from Viet- nam. Paul's ear for the cadences of emphasis is perfect—and the emphasis of not abandoned his English and American characters but additionally the Chinese, Malays, Indians and added nationalities who assemblage his novels. There is no “flied lice” or “no tickee, no shirtee” chat in his memoir, the narrator of “Saint Jack” justifiably boasts.
Alexander and Eugene access the aforementioned astonishing artful instinct. Eugene does amusing imitations of Chinese officials—it is a advantage to apprehend him anecdotic his efforts to actuate them that White Elephant is a poor barter name for bicycles, or Pansy for men's clothing. And Alexander is able of capturing instantly the articulation and gestures of anyone he meets. “Three Wogs” displays an artful ability that surpasses alike Paul's. Actuality is the dreary, captious Mrs. Proby, unleashing her apprenticed bigotry on the Irish: “It will be a acceptable St. Geoffrey's Day in the Acreage of Never afore we see an end to all those grog‐blossomed faces disembarking on the Liverpool docks with their fiddler's money and forty‐eleven youngsters, nappies, and plans, I fancy, for eight dozen more, all to be had, apperception you,
But the afflatus for banter is generally rage, and alike admitting the bigots in “Three Wogs” are avenged (Mrs. Proby, for example, with a adulteration bound inflicted by Yunnum Fu, a Chinese grocer who has continued suffered her contempt), there is a advancing racist bend to his portraits of foreigners—just as there is in Paul's books. “The Abundant Railway Bazaar” is awash with barbarous portraits: The archetypal Iranian macho is “a brainless fatigued animal for whom woman is abandoned meat”; Afghans are “lazy, idle, and violent.” Paul's approach of banter is a sophisticated, affable condescension; Alexander has added in accustomed with Baron Corvo, his accustomed arcane mentor. Corvo, that paranoid, antisocial concern of English abstract who flourished in advised obscurity during the backward 19th century, aspired in his novels to accomplish his enemies ”smart and wince and squirm”; and Alexander, too, considers abstract a anatomy of revenge.
Alexander himself disavows any proclivity for what he calls “Corvine contentiousness,” but his book and chat are accomplished by profane, adorned invective. In the parlor of some afraid neighbors, a adoring earlier couple, he rises from the couch in action as he imagines annual his acclaimed atypical afore an admirers of Harvard professors. “You, Professor
————,” he yells in his ample Medford accent, cutting the air with a alarming feel and absolution fly a advance of execrations. Delivering a argumentation adjoin the Dutch, he dismisses them as “cheesegobbling oafs who consign cossack fabricated out of trees.” Unshaven, cutting a decrepit sweater, he takes amusement in announcement his abundance of abstruse lore: belled annihilation cases, the dying words of acclaimed writers, quotations from his admired poets.
Corvo became a biographer abandoned afterwards he bootless in his efforts to become a priest, and Alexander additionally already aspired to the priesthood. Afterwards graduation from Medford High School, he aloof to a Trappist abbey in Spencer, Mass., area he obeyed the vows of blackout for two years (an acquaintance that sheds ablaze on the contrarily abstruse inclusion, beneath “language proficiency” in his class vitae, of “sign language”). But “my garrulity was irrepressible,” he laments, so he became a amateur in a Franciscan seminary abreast Callicoon, N.Y. Two years later, he abandoned his airy adventure for good. “I could accept been a saint,” he brand to say, “but I became a man of lerrers.”
First, however, there was a abrupt apprenticeship as a architecture artisan in Boston. It was abandoned afterwards he was laid off (“You allocution too abuse much,” the foreman explained) that he absitively to appear St. Francis Academy in Biddeford, Me. — “an bookish Howard Johnson's.” His strange, animated stories, essays and balladry appeared in The Canticle, the academy arcane journal. Afterwards four years at the
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Paul's approach of banter is a sophisticated, affable condescension; Alexander has added in accustomed with Baron Corvo and considers abstract a anatomy of revenge.
‘I'm an ascendancy on eunuchry,’ boasts Alexander, whose library contains, in accession to 250 books about Dickens, an array of abstruse sex books. University of Virginia, area he becoming a Ph.D. in English abstract (his apriorism was on Samuel Beckett), Alexander spent a year in London on a Fulbright, again alternate to Virginia to advise at Longwood Academy in Farmville—apparently a applicable name for that “town of cretins” area he languished for three years, until Monroe Engel, a academician at Harvard, apprehend “Three Wogs” and arrive him there. He accomplished at Harvard until aftermost year, aback his nonrenewable arrangement came to an end, and he has accustomed a column at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., alpha in the fall.
For all his garrulity, Alexander is a antisocial array who lives abandoned in the handsome white board farmhouse on Cape Cod that he bought three years ago. But he does accept company: Bessie, the sheep; St. Dominic, the goat; General Grant, the Shetland pony (a daguerreotype of Grant hangs on the bank of the animals’ stable); some guinea fowl, and a craven alleged Boobie, who lives in the kitchen, the sole survivor of a fox's depredations on the craven accommodation aftermost winter. Again there are altered cats, and a peahen clucking in the yard. Alike afterwards added guests around, the acreage can assume awash indeed.
The abode is broadcast with arcane artifacts: On the agency in the bedchamber is a achromatic photograph of William Faulkner at 23, acquired from a flat in Mississippi; in the hall, an aboriginal Edward Gorey analogy committed to Alexander (they are accompany and neighbors); in the summer house, a archetypal of Benjamin Robert Haydon's afterlife affectation of Keats. But the best arresting affection of this abode that Alexander compares to “Emily Dickinson's soul” is the library, which houses a arresting accumulating of attenuate and aboriginal editions: some 250 books about Dickens and two sets of his calm works; a active archetype of Lytton Strachey's “Elizabeth and Essex”; Greek and Latin classics, which he reads in the original; an array of abstruse sex books (“I'm an ascendancy on eunuchry,” Alexander boasts), and the best admired accumulating of Baron Corvo's assignment I accept anytime seen. A animal skull stands on a belvedere in one bend of the room, and in the average of the far wall, beaming in apparent board frame, hangs an oil annual of an aerial adolescent man cutting a tunic, his abstracted beam acute by the painting's atramentous background. A brownish applique added to the anatomy identifies the Stendhalian amount with aside rose cast in his cheeks as d'Arconville, the hero of Alexander's work-in-progress, and the annual is by the author. It is the abandoned painting he has anytime done. “I apprehend a argument book on how to mix paints,” he explains, but it is nonetheless a mystifying accomplishment.
One night aftermost winter, I awash beside the old Franklin stove in Alexander's kitchen— the abode is unheated—and listened to a few selections from his amateurish novel, the account disconnected abandoned by casual squawks from Boobie. It is an immense, anarchic work, accomplished by the author's abbreviated ability of English abstract and employing, rather in the address of “Ulysses,” a altered brand in every chapter: sermons, a play, bare verse, ballsy couplets, a diary. One chapter, advantaged “The Misogynist's Library,” is artlessly a annual of books, some invented but best of them genuine, that accept excoriated women. “There are books on this annual that haven't been mentioned in 400 years,” Alexander claimed, “words that haven't been uttlered in bristles cen-
Interspersed with these busy displays of bookishness are capacity that display Alexander's arresting abusive gifts. The admiral of a Southern academy (“his academician a pot-au-feu of boomism, bad grammar and prejudice”), redneck Klansmen in a backcountry Virginia diner, altered Harvard deans ... the atypical is a awash arcade of types assuredly modeled (as Corvo's novels were) on bodies the columnist has accustomed and disliked. One of the capital characters is d'Arconville's beloved, who betrays him and marries accession man—a accomplishment that had its adverse allusive in Alexander's own life. Eight years ago, he was affianced to one of his acceptance from Longwood Academy ('an accustomed Southern girl,” as Peter describes her; “a accustomed allotment of licitation,” in Alexander's edgeless formulation), who acclimated to accuse to her fiancĂ©, “You allocution like a book.” Still, Alexander was in adulation with her and busied himself with abundant affairs for bells commemoration in Westminster Cathedral. But this adolescent woman was acutely addled by the grandiose, unkempt, babbling biographer nine years her senior, and “no added able to ally Alex,” Eugene asserted, pointing beyond a restaurant, “than [to marry] that man over there.'
When she larboard him, Alexander vowed to avenge himself in a novel. “Do your worst,” she taunted, and the 700 pages composed in calligraphy on chicken acknowledged pads that accept accumulated so far represent his long‐winded retort. Alexander promises it will be “the abundant accessible treatise.” So bedeviled is he with this absolute or absurd betrayal that he includes a buried advertence to her in around aggregate he writes and hasn't alike afflicted to change her name in the novel. Eugene is so anxious about the achievability of a clothing that he already alleged Alexander and affected he was a Southern advocate retained by the ex‐fiancĂ©e to assure her from libel—a tactic that abashed Alexander but bootless to alarm him. “All abundant books wobble on the border of libel,” he says.
This accomplished adventure may complete cautiously melodramatic, but Alexander is butterfingers of accustomed passions. Still, his appropriate attitude adjoin women is beneath angry than anachronistic. “I'm traditional,” he already told me. “I appetite addition who will accept accouchement and can baker lasagna.” His accepted adherent is 22, never abounding college, and lives at home with her parents in Everett, Mass., a working‐class, predominantly Italian association arctic of Boston. She hardly reads his work. How did they meet? Alexander says he glimpsed her four years ago in Harvard Square, strode up and “I adulation you.”
I would not affliction to adumbrate the fate of Alexander's novel. It is a brilliant, appropriate work, graced with the bizarre cant that abounds in “Three Wogs,” and I achievement it becomes one of those books kept animate by a few loyal readers in anniversary generation, like Edmund Gosse's “Father and Son” or Corvo's novels. But conceivably it is too literary; conceivably Alexander would do bigger to put added of Medford in his work. If this bulky atypical charcoal unread, Alexander's appearance will abide to be talked of and appreciated, like Oscar Wilde's, as if it were itself a assignment of art.
As of this writing, the Therouxs accept already added dis- persed in their accepted fashion. Eugene, now afar from the biographer Phyllis Theroux, is on the border of affective to a acreage in Lovettsville, Va. Joseph is in Samoa, active “in the accepted grass berth bottomward by the ocean”; he got affiliated there this spring, and the ancestors was not invited. Peter will be belief at New College, Oxford, afterwards graduation from Harvard. Alexander inhabits a annex of his own, alteration his atypical in the kitchen while the guinea fowl absolute their acute screams on the roof and the peahen trots in the yard. Paul has aloof alternate from South America to London, area he awaits the reviews of “Picture Palace” and is no agnosticism commutual accession best seller. (At aftermost report, he had completed 40,00 words,)
But no amount how far away they travel, or how absorbing their accomplishments, there charcoal in the Therouxs a balance of their origins—as there does in everyone. With the accession of summer, the association will assemble on Cape Cod, area Paul, Alexander, Eugene and their parents all own houses. They like to anticipate of themselves as an accustomed American family—and they are, except for their assurance to claim, by agency of literature, travel, art and the agronomics of experience, added of the apple than would commonly accept been accessible to them. They alarm to apperception an ascertainment Henry James already fabricated about his family, accession association of writers: “We were ... such a aggregation of characters and such a account of differences, and along so alloyed and affiliated and interlocked, that anniversary of us ..... pleads for canning ■
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