“I’M SICK OF MORALIZATIONS”
Truman Capote was among the last who came to visit Denny as the noose tightened around his life. Whether in reality or in his mind, the gendarmes seemed to be closing in, both because of his purchase of drugs and his penchant for handsome teenagers. It would just be days before he was forcibly evicted from Peter’s apartment.
Denny decided to move to Rome when he heard that heroin could be obtained easily there and learned from Gore Vidal that the police in Rome let the trade in rent boys flourish. He asked Michael Wishart to join him. “With a shudder of the soul,” Michael knew that he no longer could be a part of Denny’s life, that what he would look back on decades later when he wrote his memoirs as “the impurest happiness I have ever known”1 was over. Denny accused Michael of cowardice, and left for Rome with Trotsky and Tony Watson-Gandy, the British RAF officer who adored him. There was always someone.
Michael returned alone to England. He never again would hear from Denny. Romantic passion triggers the same chemical reactions associated with all addictions, and in Michael’s dopamine-drenched brain “the thought of Denham was painful for a long time”2 as he suffered through the throes of withdrawal.
The poet Charles Henri Ford, who for over two decades was the lover of Pavel Tchelitchev, the artist who had painted that huge Adonis nude that had hung above Denny’s bed in Paris, wrote in his diary in September of 1948 that a friend had told him that Denham at thirty-four “still looks so young, not over 28, no lines in his face, hasn’t got a gray hair.” Ford noted in his diary that “it’s not doing the things one wants to do—even if considered a ‘vice,’ like opium taking—that makes one age, but doing the things one doesn’t want to do.”3 Denny continued on as he always had, trying not to do the things he didn’t want to do. It was getting harder.
From Rome, Denny wrote increasingly desperate letters to Peter Watson, alternatively asking for money and accusing him of causing all his problems. Peter was facing his own problems. His income from the trust funds had fallen sharply, taxes in England had risen, and his investments in France had been wiped out by the War. As Waldemar Hansen wrote about Peter to a friend on September 11, 1948: “And now, he’s reduced to watching the lira in Italy, eating in cautious style, etc. He can’t buy any more paintings because he hasn’t got the money abroad, and England won’t import. He loathes London and has to live there most of the time. He hasn’t got a car, nor a house, nor an apartment in Paris. He watches the area of his life get smaller and smaller and smaller.”4
Peter was well aware how his life had changed: “I seem to have suffered the death of feeling myself,” he had written to a friend a few months before:
I just can’t react any more. It all seems so futile anyway, as we are under the sentence of death, I feel. If only the world contained some hope. Intelligence, freedom are monstrous luxuries which this world can no longer afford. If only I could take things for granted like any stupid person can ... Like you, I am only interested in life it if reaches a certain standard, and now that standard has gone forever and there is no pleasure left which is not ersatz ... How terrible it is to grow old. One loses so many tastes one had and seems to get no new ones at all. Wisdom doesn’t settle anything—it only removes one from old friends and prevents one from making any new ones. Then it is so humiliating to have all one’s old beliefs and enthusiasms turned inside out. The only thing is to be young as it makes egotism elegant.5
Peter once remarked to a friend that “I cannot bear to see self-destruction in friends or in anyone else, and I react violently against it.”6 Watching from afar as Denny’s life careened out of control made him miserable.
Peter knew that Denny was “diabolical in pinning the blame on to others,”7 but nevertheless was tormented by his letters, and on November 30 wrote to Waldemar: “Denham wrote me a reproachful self-pitying letter from Rome saying that I had done nothing to help him! My God, I have been paying for all his self-indulgent auto-destruction, besides his doctors and nursing homes ... I can’t understand what people want of me or expect me to do. Denham and what happened to him is the perfect example of someone evading every issue through someone else, and when he does have to stand on his own legs, they just aren’t there. So he is forced to use everyone else as a prop to his own weakness.”8
Johnny Goodwin, a wealthy American author who Denny had befriended in California, visited him in Rome in November. “He and Denny are like brothers,” Christopher Isherwood commented, “in many ways, Johnny is simply Denny with money.” Denny, though, was wary of his friend’s visit: “You can sit here as long as you don’t start moralizing,” Denny told him. “I’m sick of moralizations.”9 Like everyone else, Johnny tried reasoning. As he wrote to Christopher:
... I told him very brutally why he had lost all his friends (as he constantly complained of), it was that he was not himself any more. He asked in his strange, rational and yet hazy way just in what way was he different. It was hard to tell him for I meant really saying that he was not at all rational, that his habits of lying abed and living a kind of Poe existence made it difficult to share anything of the world with him. But he seemed to see finally what I meant and for a week until I left, though his habits didn’t change, he wanted to live, which was something he hadn’t cared one way or another about for a long time. He was seriously considering going to England or America to a psychiatrist which I was all for, even though I admitted to him and he agreed that they were only a very last resort.10
According to Denny’s cousin, Denny was planning to return to the United States, home to Jacksonville to write. He sent ahead to his mother a large mailing envelope stuffed with manuscript pages—perhaps a draft of his memoirs. His mother read them, realized her son was gay, and burned every page.11
Bernard Perlin, a young artist who had met Denny in Rome, visited Denny early in December, Denny in bed, corpse-like, the sheet drawn to his chin, a cigarette between his lips, his lover, Tony, removing the cigarette and tapping it each time before it burned him. This was to be his final visitor. Ever a night fiend, Denny injected the drugs he kept in a cigar box in his room and, as always, instantly came to life, went out for the evening, and vaporized into the mists.12
On Christmas Day, December 25, 1948, Glenway Wescott sat in Stone-Blossom, his farm in Hampton, New Jersey, and in his perfect script, wrote to his friend, Christopher Isherwood, in Santa Monica, California:
Dear Christopher,
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 16th.
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.