Fritz Peters
WHY FRITZ? WHY NOW?
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Fritz lived from 1913-1979. Born in Wisconsin, he spent much of his turbulent youth in France, interacting with remarkable people operating at a frontier of human experience. People like his mentor and father figure, G.I. Gurdjieff, and his aunt, Margaret Anderson—plus the gaggle of avant-garde greats in her milieu. Fritz learned that words and thoughts were a path to social standing and self-respect. “He was brilliant, talented. He hung out with e.e. cummings and D.H. Lawrence. He enjoyed the fame he got, but I think he wanted to be a big star,” said his daughter, Katharine Rivers.
It is difficult to define a person, even in hindsight, since people are developing stories. But by midlife, Fritz’s best writing was behind him. His memoirs Boyhood with Gurdjieff (1964), and Gurdjieff Remembered (1965), are the exception. His literary career after The Descent (1952) mostly amounted to rejected manuscripts and burned bridges. In the mid-1960s, a reader at Farrar Straus scrawled, “I doubt that the manuscript will get anywhere—it is so obviously [close to/or] psychotic. The poor bastard has had (and has given others) an awful life. I am not hopeful that anything will result.”
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“He had a death wish, he was drinking himself to death,” said Fritz’s friend, psychologist Barbara Vacarr, of his last decade of life. Cirrhosis was noted on his death certificate. At the close of World War II, his mentor, mystic and healer G. I. Gurdjieff, recognized the delicacy of Fritz’s condition and recommended that he drink, but “consciously”…
He insisted that I had such a need, but that it was periodic, and predicted that if I gauged the need properly I would go through periods where I would drink—or would need to drink—a good deal, and also sometimes through long periods when I would not need to drink at all; in fact, at such times, I would find that liquor might even be harmful for me.
Gurdjieff implies that alcohol was a way to modulate Fritz’s erratic moods, and probably anesthetize painful memories, but finding the prescribed balance proved perilous.
Mental illness has a nature and nurture component, both at play in Fritz’s development. His childhood amounted to mitigated orphanhood due to his parents’ divorce and his mother’s nervous breakdowns. His mother remarried multiple times, selecting husbands who were not safe or did not want Fritz and his brother Tom present. Fritz preferred the care of Margaret Anderson, his maternal aunt, and her partner Jane Heap—largely so he could live at Gurdjieff’s Institute. However, there were skeletons in that closet. This graphic episode that Fritz recounted in 1978 occurred when he was 11 years old. His disconnected, almost blasé attitude about it makes one wonder what other horrors he experienced:
The final so-called disaster occurred when Jane [Heap], in a fit of anger…struck me with a board from a crate with nails in it. Jane lost that one (or I won it, depending on how you look at it) because although the nails went all the way into my back and I was bleeding, I did not break down, cry, or otherwise participate in the scene. Jane was more than contrite, fell to her knees, hugged me, and begged for my forgiveness. I think that was the first time that my born ‘rage to live’ turned into active hatred. I told her that I would not only not forgive her—it was “not my province” was one of the things that I said—but I told her that I would get even. I regret, in the long run, to have to admit that I did. On the same compulsive, unconscious, dreary level.
His first novel, The World Next Door (1949), shows how “succumbing to one’s demons” in this manner, can be an oversimplification. As the novel unfolds in vivid stream-of-consciousness, we see that severe mental illness is not a sick spell that occurs in the context of a healthy mind, akin to a head cold. Instead, it is a state of confusion that overtakes a person who is a tenuous arrangement of wholeness; so, wholeness cannot be maintained over an extended stretch of life, with all its inherent hardships. Fritz explores the connection between alcohol and mental illness in this striking passage:
Only the liquor, a thin hot stream inside me, dripped like fuel to the last ember of warmth and light between my ribs, and fought the darkness. But there is another light beginning now: a light that does not warm, but reveals and distorts. In this light, pallor becomes sickness, and sickness, death. As the darkness itself had spread like the moving blotch of blood upon bright cloth, so this light penetrated the darkness.
When Fritz lost control of his mental state, on an extreme of what was then called manic depression, there would be no “Fritz” there to manage the alcohol, or moods, or work, or parenting, or other relationships. He would not know he was so compromised, and often neither would those closest to him. Fig. 1 summarizes the periods of instability during Fritz’s most productive decade of writing, much of which became fuel for his fiction. He recuperated in a mental hospital after his breakdown in 1958, during which he stared into the sun and claimed to be the second coming, just like the protagonist in The World Next Door (see Fig 2). Forced to admit Fritz would never be a safe caretaker to their children, Jean Peters initiated divorce proceedings.
Fritz’s ability to inhabit healthy and imbalanced states and communicate them to readers is one of his most illuminating transmissions—one for which he paid dearly. It would be an understatement to say that Fritz was a difficult person to live with and love. Though he was rarely single, his relationships were volatile and tended to end in explosions, if not mental breakdowns. This is perhaps why relationships—the ways in which they are doomed and the reasons they are inevitable—are what Fritz found most inspiring to write about. He distilled relationships into the heartbreaking truth that is the lifeblood of literature.
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The World Next Door is about a mental patient, David Mitchell’s, relationship with himself, his medical staff, and his family. It examines everyone’s interests and self-interest, as they scrap for dominance in the bureaucracy of a VA mental ward. Though highly autobiographical, it would be naive to take David Mitchell’s words entirely at face value—he was, after all, suffering from paranoid delusions. Conversely, David Mitchell did not leave the VA Hospital against medical advice, whereas Fritz’s former wife reports that he did (see Fig. 1). Still, the novel speaks unflinchingly about how it feels to go through electroshock and other crude techniques of early psychiatry, about cruelty from overburdened attendants, about a post-war government institution that cared for some of its veterans (white, straight) better than others (black, gay).
Fig 1:
Fig 2:
Excerpts from a letter from Fritz’s wife, Jean R. Peters to his Psychologist, Dr. St. Pierre, at the VA Hospital in Topeka Kansas, in 1958.
(Fig. 1) We see how Fritz struggled with instability even in his most successful decade of writing. Elements from his novels are present, such as the suicide attempt in Finistère (1951), and the car crash in The Descent (1952).
(Fig. 2) The World Next Door (1949) is more directly autobiographical, as his wife Jean attested in further notes about his 1958 breakdown.
In The World Next Door, the protagonist is conflicted about his homosexual inclinations. He claims not to prefer the company of men—he does not, therefore, identify as homosexual. However, he asserts the naturalness of his homosexual relationship: “I was in love with him, that’s all." Societal context makes this stance understandable, yet revolutionary. This is because mental illness, discrimination, and homosexuality were linked in the context of a VA mental ward in the late 40s, much more deeply than today’s reader might expect.
At the dawn of World War II, the U.S. military planned to cull any recruits at high risk for mental illness—prone to “shellshock,” and costly disability payments. Psychiatry as a discipline was in its infancy, so the military added rounds of psychiatric testing to the physical screening process. After World War I, “The U.S. Government spent more than a billion dollars to treat mental casualties, and it was widely recognized that the government had a responsibility to avoid a huge loss of men and money in the next war.”
In 1941, the category of “Homosexual proclivities” was specifically identified as a form of mental illness incompatible with military service by the advisory board to the military psychiatrists running the screening process. Homosexual behavior was deemed a form of sexual deviancy and a pre-psychotic state. Many recruits with homosexual proclivities desired to join the war effort, however, and managed to avoid detection.
At the end of World War II, the US Military hunted down and dishonorably discharged these homosexual soldiers. Gay servicemen found guilty of sodomy were incarcerated, as it was illegal, and lesbian soldiers were also targeted. A dishonorable discharge rendered these soldiers ineligible for benefits, and they suffered sometimes serious indignities in the process. At worst, they were held in impromptu brigs, in prisoner-of-war conditions, possibly sexually assaulted, even, by their own captors. This phenomenon is echoed in The World Next Door when David Mitchell has an experience of being sexually coerced by an attendant in the VA hospital. For those homosexual soldiers lucky enough to be stationed where the US Army ejected them under less inhumane conditions, the outcome was still damaging. A diagnosis would be placed on the gay soldier’s discharge papers which could out them as homosexual.
If a diagnosis was listed on the discharge papers, the soldiers would be associated with a mental illness that sounded severe. “Psychotic personality” was one such label. Anyone looking at their records could see the reason for their discharge—such as potential employers who requested military records for job applications. Homosexuals who managed to be hired were not secure in their offices, either. Thousands of homosexual employees were purged from Federal positions during the Lavender Scare of McCarthyism, under discriminatory practices which persisted in the following decades.
It is difficult to know how these policies affected Fritz during his short stint in the military, since he was justifiably mentally ill enough to be hospitalized and was honorably discharged. This context explains, however, why the medical staff was aware of David Mitchell’s gay relationship in The World Next Door, and why the flirtation with the gay General was such a delicate matter. It explains why it was so difficult for Fritz and doctors to separate his sexuality from his mental illness. It also explains the stakes of going straight, and how confusing the situation must have been for a man with homosexual leanings, and manic depression, who was also attracted to women. A post-war reader would know this background, and perceive the hidden currents it creates in the storyline.
The World Next Door impressed the medical community in 1949 and was carried in psychiatric libraries. They valued it because it was a unique first-hand account of what a severely ill patient experiences on a mental ward. Timely and bold, it also struck a nerve with post-war readers. “Not so much composed as forced out of the writer by the need to put down a terrible experience while still raw and quivering from its impact,” wrote Antonia White, in New Statesman. With its experimental treatment of such gritty subject matter, Peters’ autobiographical novel was critically well-received on the literary front and Fritz was lauded as a young writer to watch.
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Finistère, published only two years after The World Next Door, is a coming-of-age, coming-out story about a teen’s love affair with the tennis coach at his French boarding school. It is Fritz Peters’ most successful book, by far. Hirsch Giovanni chose to adapt Finistère for screen first, not because of its popularity, but because of its zeitgeist as a landmark novel of queer literature. So much ground has been won for queer rights over the past century, and so many aspects of gender have been redefined, that the current mood is to be reflective about the past while envisioning the future. Finistère’s themes of confusion, isolation, and self-destruction in the face of intolerance are, sadly, still applicable to queer teens today. But Finistère also celebrates love’s ability to blossom where it is required, and it portrays love as an instinctive tropism toward healing and hope. It is thus a pioneering gay paean as much as it is a classic romance relevant to anyone who loves.
Finistère would not be art if it did not ask difficult questions and reveal uncomfortable truths. Today’s readers are, hopefully, dismayed that the lovers in Finistère are so far apart in age. Michel is in his late 20s, and Matthew is only a teen. Upon opening the book to read, this writer was concerned the material might be handled inappropriately. Closing the book, those concerns were allayed. Finistère, with all its controversial aspects, provides valuable insight into the field of human experience.
It is perhaps unavoidable to compare Finistère to Nabokov’s Lolita. Lolita is also a classic, adapted to film amid controversy. Readers find its age gap scandalous. However, Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita, has a predilection for young ladies and premeditatively targets girls without remorse. He marries Lolita’s mother to get closer to the object of his desire. Humbert is, simply put, a pedophile. On the contrary, Michel is a gay man who is uncomfortable with older/younger affairs, even though they were accepted by his peers in 1920s Paris. Michel broke with his long-term lover when the latter engaged in an encounter with an adolescent, the last straw after multiple infidelities. Heartbroken and disgusted, Michel accepts a teaching position that his father arranges. Michel is relieved to escape the excesses of Paris and has abandoned all hope for love. Suppressing his sexual impulses entirely—“vows of chastity, purity, reform”—seems the best course of action. Matthew, though younger, initiates and directs the affair. Such details mitigate Michel’s questionable behavior as much as possible. Many readers will likely react with moral disgust anyway, condemning Michel, opining that as the superior, Michel should have drawn a line—should not have engaged in any physical encounter with a student. Michel could have waited, they might say, if the two really loved each other. That perspective is valid.
However, relationships like Matthew and Michel’s happen, and they happen for a reason. Finistère faces this reality. Why did it happen in this case? Why was it doomed? Does that mean such relationships are always doomed? Would Matthew have survived to adulthood with nobody to love him? If Michel had loved Matthew better, would their affair still have ended in tragedy? Was it possible for Michel to love Matthew better? What family and societal contexts contributed to the outcome? How would you feel if you read it as a teenager? Would you feel differently if you read it as a parent? Have you ever done anything unwise for love? Saying Michel should have drawn a line is like saying Othello should have ignored Iago. Pondering controversial situations in stories develops wisdom and compassion, fostering better decisions in the real world. That has always been the utility of tragedy.
When Fritz wrote Finistère he was in his late thirties and married to Harper’s Bazaar fiction editor, Mary Lou Aswell. Fritz dedicated The World Next Door to Mary Lou, “without whom this book would not have been written.” Aswell also had an interest in mental illness; she edited a book titled The World Within (1947), shortly before meeting Fritz, which is a collection of “fiction illuminating the neuroses of our time.” She fostered the careers of many homosexual writers in Bazaar’s pages, including Truman Capote. Ed Field, (Fritz’s friend, gay poet and World War II veteran) reported that what Fritz wrote depended on the relationship he was in at the time, so it seems that Mary Lou was Fritz’s most effective muse.
Aswell would go on to partner with sculptor Agnes Sims, her first same-sex lover, and Fritz dedicated his next novel, The Descent, to Agnes. The two women moved to Santa Fe, where their household was openly possible. One of the most affecting dynamics in Finistère is the impossibility for same-sex relationships to endure in a culture that is so intolerant of them. Although the current fashion bends toward feel-good LGBTQ stories, it is also important to understand the necessity of societal support to provide a framework for lasting relationships. In Finistère the “problem” was not the homosexuality, it was the intolerance. It is this perspective that made Finistère so pioneering. Threatened by Matthew’s naivete, Michel remarks, “I suppose there’s no reason why you should be able to understand that your happiness is something the world would think of as ugly and horrible and unnatural. But they do and I guess you’ll learn soon enough.”
The New York Times review echoed this sentiment, saying “So far as this reviewer recalls, this is the best novel he has ever read on the theme of homosexuality (Proust excepted) and its tragic consequences in a world made up of ‘selfish, ruthless, cruel, egocentric people.’” Ed Field agreed: “Finistère is a marvelous book. It was the first gay novel I read, the rest were pulp.”
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During the breakup of his marriage to Mary Lou, at the close of 1950, Fritz stood on the side of the highway interviewing motorists in upstate New York. He was working on his next novel, The Descent. If Finistère is a novel about why homosexual relationships cannot work, The Descent is a novel about why heterosexual relationships cannot work. We see couples poisoned by gender norms; the desire to dominate and be dominated poisoning Henry and Mabel, the cycle of lust and shame poisoning Caroline and Tom, the projections of male inadequacy poisoning Richard and Dorothy.
At the time Fritz operated in society as a heterosexual, but he always had male lovers. Fritz writes female characters remarkably well for a male writer, inhabiting them in a manner that only someone who has been an object of male desire can. He has an objective, almost anthropological eye to gender relations. Doris Hart, the hospital admin from The Descent, exemplifies this when she casts off the desire for validation from her patronizing, patriarchal psychologist. “What was it that Dr. Cramwell had written? ‘Psychological problems?’ ‘Primeval female sexual manifestations?’ It was all a lot of nonsense. And why was she spending ten hard-earned dollars an hour to go to him?”
Doris Hart’s reverie continues on a slightly different track, “She thought of her husband with curious unexpected tenderness. If she stopped going to Dr. Cramwell, he’d be able to afford a new suit. And she might, eventually, be able to afford a television set.” The Descent is also a portrait of post-war America and its hyperactive consumer-conformism, playing out in intimate relationships. This conformism was itself a veneer over societal divisions and war trauma—exemplified by the character of Jim Curran, the troubled war veteran. How can veterans relate to those who stayed home, and vice versa? How can men and women bridge the gender gap? Another return to normalcy. Do we all realize how normal it is to feel unfulfilled? What is the American Dream’s answer to that? Where are we all going, so fast?
A tightly written suspense novel with a Twilight Zone feel, The Descent was well-received. However, Fritz could not know the turn his life was about to take. He would not publish again for twelve years. After finishing The Descent, Fritz fell into a long-term relationship with a man for the first time, Santa Fe-based painter Cady Wells. Fritz thought Cady was “the one,” but it ended in volatile fights:
Although Cady was enraptured with Fritz, his friends found Peters threatening and hateful, and he was a deeply disturbed man (he apparently once tried to kill Cady with a knife). Another of Peters’ lovers, the painter William Brown, explained that each time Peters had a homosexual love affair he would rebound from it by marrying.
Cady died soon after their split, of a heart attack, and Fritz headed into family life, marrying Jean. As The Descent foretold, and as already discussed, family life was not a good fit. After their divorce, Fritz moved to New York and finally found a stable relationship, by Fritz’s standards, with painter Lloyd Goff. He seemed more at peace living as a gay man, according to his daughter. He sent money home for the children and kept in contact via frequent letters, phone calls, gifts, and occasional visits. He finally attempted writing again. His U.K. publisher, Victor Gollancz, encouraged him to write memoirs. Fritz published Boyhood with Gurdjieff in 1964, for which Henry Miller wrote the preface, saying “I regard it as something on a par with Alice in Wonderland, a real treasure of our literature.” Although it was a critical success followed by a sequel, Gurdjieff Remembered (1965), in terms of sales the memoirs found only a niche. The World Next Door was recorded for French radio and there were references, in Fritz’s letters to Farrar Straus, to film deals that never solidified. He attempted writing novels again, and the rejections hit hard. He harangued Farrar Straus to republish his earlier novels or else revert the rights to him. Fritz was soon short on cash, began drinking more and more heavily and took on a seedy appearance. At the start of the 70s, Fritz headed back to Santa Fe, began a new novel, and published a final essay about Gurdjieff. Although Gurdjieff had died some 30 years earlier, Fritz spent his last days remembering the man and what they had meant to each other.
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Gurdjieff had a powerful personality and a magnetic aura; it was easy for him to attract seekers to learn the esoteric wisdom he had accumulated. A mainstay of the philosophy at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was that people go through life “asleep,” so precious few develop themselves anywhere near their capacity. This is due to a failure to “do the work”—people lack the knowledge and focus to develop their various “centers.” The “centers” are the Intellectual, Emotional, and Physical modes of being. These centers operate individually and together, creating new processes, requiring many types of “work” to exercise them all. Gurdjieff even called his teachings, “The Work.” Confronting the real world, and all the obstacles one must overcome to finish a job, was one way to “wake up.” This was chop-wood-carry-water spirituality, involving tasks like cooking, gardening, roofing, lawnmowing. Music and dance held a special role in the curriculum. Gurdjieff also employed flamboyant tricks, like pranks, to incite friction between people, launching them headfirst into healing crises. Dealing with the “unpleasant manifestations of others” leads to self-awareness and growth. Therefore, Gurdjieff appreciated Fritz’s diligence, as much as his aptitude for mischief:
Gurdjieff laughed, "What you not understand," he said, "is that not everyone can be troublemaker, like you. This important in life—is ingredient, like yeast for making bread. Without trouble, conflict, life become dead. People live in status quo, live only by habit, automatically, and without conscience. You good for Miss Madison. You irritate Miss Madison all time—more than anyone else, which is why you get most reward. Without you, possibility for Miss Madison's conscience fall asleep.
Putting Gurdjieff’s practices in parable form is what Fritz achieves in Boyhood with Gurdjeff, in the direct style of Gurdjieff’s teaching. As Gurdjieff’s personal assistant, Fritz had an intimate view of the goings-on in the Institute. Gurdjieff appreciated Fritz’s interest in philosophy and psychology, saying that Fritz was a “trash can” for Gurdjieff to “dump” his teaching into. What probably made Fritz so empty is that he had been abandoned by his family. He needed a trustworthy adult who could direct his curiosity and his stubborn streak. Fritz would never shake Gurdjieff’s influence and would always work to digest it – Gurdjieff’s ideas pervade Fritz’s writing. Though Fritz read voraciously, he never finished high school nor attended college. Gurdjieff’s Institute was his education, the stories he walked with and measured against. Michael Vacarr, Fritz’s friend explained:
Fritz said Gurdjieff saved his life. He was the only adult who made sense to him. Could Gurdjieff have saved his brother’s life? I don’t know. There was something Fritz brought to the situation with Gurdjieff that allowed Fritz to benefit from it. And Gurdjieff didn’t let Fritz get lost in feeling sorry for himself.
Shortly before his death in 1949, Gurdjieff enacted an impactful prank-teaching, when he made an announcement at a gathering of students that Fritz attended. As Fritz recounts it, Gurdjieff said:
‘In life is only necessary for man to find one person to whom can give accumulation of learning in life. When find such receptacle, then is possible die.’ He smiled, benevolently, and went on: ‘So now two good things happen for me. I finish work and I also find one person to whom can give results my life’s work.’ He raised his arm again, started to move it, this time with a finger extended and pointing, around the room, and then stopped when his finger was pointing directly at me. There was an enormous silence in the room and Gurdjieff and I looked at each other fixedly, but, even so, I was aware that one or two of the others had turned to look in my direction. The tension in the atmosphere did not lessen until Gurdjieff dropped his arm, turned, and left the room.”
Fritz would struggle with the mantle of chosen successor for the rest of his life. Gurdieff’s motivations for announcing this were mysterious, and Fritz thought of a few explanations. First, it might be “actually true.” Second, it might be intended to “expose” Fritz’s “massive ego” to himself—this was the preferred explanation of many Gurdjieff followers. Third, perhaps it was “a huge joke on the devout followers.”
There is a special irony in selecting a person with a Messiah Complex to be one’s “true successor.” It is even possible Gurdjieff was making a joke at his own expense. Whatever the case, Fritz was “moved, confused, and perplexed” by the event. Fritz would spend the rest of his days causing fuss and friction at Gurdjieff meetings and claiming to be the true successor, whether he truly believed it or not.
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Fritz was more human than most. With internal and external experiences so extreme, he encountered the range of human experience in a way most people do not. There has always been a link between manic depression and creativity, perhaps because it is difficult to communicate peak experiences without resorting to art. In person Fritz could be charming, present, helpful, and funny—also irascible, inappropriate, inebriated, and exhausting. All of that is in his writing.
Given Fritz’s extreme states, it is surprising that the real power of his writing is its startling clarity; the bullseyes of emotional truth he finds. “The shadows are the first to go,” is the first line of The World Next Door—Fritz claimed e. e. cummings said it was “the best first sentence in the history of the English language.” Fritz’s writing is true, and clear, and evocative; also, readable. Fritz desired “always to be known as a readable writer rather than a great artist.” There is something of Gurdjieff’s teachings and character in the pragmatism, the immediacy, the uncompromising search for truth and self, that is at the heart of it.
But the biggest tragedy of mental instability, which Fritz captures in The World Next Door, is being unable to understand, or control, the way one hurts people. “Seeing ourselves how others see us,” as Gurdjieff would put it—is a challenge for everyone, but especially for those with a tenuous grasp on “self.” Even in his healthiest and happiest moments, Fritz spent his life in this exile. He wrote to us from the electroshock table, from the queer underground, from puberty, from the side of the road, from a marriage on its last leg, from the rubble of World War II, from Gurdjieff’s intentional community. Fritz went there and reported back—that was his gift.
