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I wanted to be Robert Phelps.

Article Excerpt
As one reads through the correspondence between Robert Phelps and James Salter, it gradually becomes clear that these are love letters. The talk is of the literary life, of magazine pieces, plays and movies, of revered "makers" like Colette and Stravinsky, of long walks in Greenwich Village and loneliness in Aspen, Colorado. But quite plainly the two men--both married and one a celebrated coureur de femmes--cannot get enough of each other. Six months after they first meet, Salter writes from Colorado: "Why don't you work here? I miss you and there's nobody to speak avec."

Nearly anyone who ever spent an afternoon or evening with Robert Phelps will attest to his wondrous charm. Composer Ned Rorem, writer Dan Wakefield, poet Richard Howard--all these have memorialized Robert's perennial youthfulness, his generosity of heart and spirit, his genius for friendship. Last year, at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, a panel on "New York in the 1950s" opened by paying homage to Phelps as the very embodiment of the era's literary life. It included two of Phelps's good friends--Dan Wakefield and the novelist and former head of the Columbia writing program, Stephen Koch--and it was organized by Phelps's former student at the New School, Derek Alger. Yet still another admirer was in the audience, and that afternoon he couldn't help but think back to some 40 years ago.

We met in May of 1968, when I was 19 years old. I was on my way to a summer in France and en route stopped in New York, my very first visit to the city. Somehow I managed to figure out the subways and eventually emerged at Union Square, then strolled, wide-eyed, through bright sunshine to 6 East 12th Street. After I'd rung the buzzer on the mailbox, Robert came bounding down the stairwell, two steps at a time. He was the father of my college roommate, but might have been his brother: black tousled hair, white T-shirt, corduroy jeans, Clarks Wallabees on his feet and a boyish grin on his face. We trudged up the steps to his book-lined aerie and by the end of that afternoon--of literary gossip and two robust Tanqueray martinis--I was drunk. I also knew that I wanted more than anything in life to be him.

We came from similar backgrounds--I grew up in Lorain, Ohio, eight miles from his hometown of Elyria; I attended Oberlin College, where he'd spent a year or so. Most of all, though, I too had long dreamed about being a writer in New York, of living by my pen and wits in an apartment full of books--real, hardcover books. On that first day Robert showed me a set of uncorrected page proofs of Randall Jarrell's The Third Book of Criticism, which he'd been assigned to review. I'd never seen page proofs before. Little did I know that I was looking at my own future.

At that time...

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