The Beholding: A Novel

About The Beholding



At last, a novel that was slated for publication in the 1960s, then suppressed because of its sexual frankness, will finally be brought into print, newly revised, so that you can judge for yourself if the writing is "tasteless, coarse, lewd, obscene, and salacious" - or a work of fierce perception written to address crucial issues of male and female sexuality a decade before Feminism and Gay Liberation. Pitchford says, "Of all my books, this one is my favorite, my masterpiece."



It's a good novel, by God, it's right and good. It frightened me sometimes . . . by its power and rightness and painful lyricism. The Beholding will stand up. It will be around for a long time. . . . Kenneth Pitchford is a great writer.

~ Robin Morgan, Going Too Far, Random House, 1977



The Beholding is a dazzling and overwhelming novel - a spectacular record of what happened to all of us in the 1960s.

~ Frank O'Hara



I've just finished reading Kenneth Pitchford's novel, The Beholding, for a second time and I feel it is truly a remarkable book, utterly original, serious and beautiful. . . . It concerns people earnestly attempting to change their lives, in the face of the death of the central character, and in the climate of apparent outer changes in the early 1960's. It's a book
which . . . will make painful and exhilarating reading, because it explores the underlying problems of relation, love, loyalty, identity with which all of us - women and men, whether heterosexual or homosexual - have been grappling.

~ Adrienne Rich



I liked Mr. Pitchford's novel The Beholding so much. I am deeply grateful for the experience of having read it.

~ Jacqueline Onassis







This powerful novel chronicles the dying of a young poet, Leonard Porterfield, at the height of his promise in the summer of 1960. His lover and cousin Alden Porterfield has found a refuge for him at an art colony in Connecticut where he can have solitude during the final phase of his Hodgkin's Disease, a cancer then predictably terminal.



But solitude is the last thing Leonard finds at Ashbourne Manor, the artist's haven where Agnes Deighton reigns as matriarch over her mentally ill daughter Delia and Delia's psychiatrist Raymond Ferris, whose real object, far from curing Delia, is to marry her and so to acquire possession of the Manor. What none of them know except Delia is that Leonard and she briefly lived as lovers in New York City the summer before.



Two uninvited guests come to visit: Jed Jones, a black twelve-tone composer with whom the Porterfields share a mescaline trip, and painter Melora Jacobs, once Leonard's lover, a troubled woman who failed to seize her one chance to claim him as her own.



In spite of everything, Melora and Alden become friends and try to curb Delia's fascination with the Manor's original owners, especially her fixation on Dorothea, the daughter who died tragically as a teen-ager. At the same time, Melora starts painting Leonard's portrait, a task she abandoned when they broke off their affair.



An instant dislike between Jed Jones and Ferris erupts one night in a brawl while Leonard and Melora are safely off on a 'date' in the nearby town. From that point on, conflicts of all kinds boil over as Leonard's health deteriorates.



On the verge of collapse, Leonard presents Delia with a piece of the Manor's history that he has dug up and that he hopes might disaffect her of any love for the Manor and all it contains.



Leonard's death follows with hideous speed, but frees Delia neither from her ghosts nor from Ferris. After his death, however, some surprising facts emerge which offer an unexpected answer to the question: Who shall inherit Ashbourne Manor?