City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (8 page)

As Frank said, “I think he’s the only established writer who goes to the bars.” Certainly no one I knew had ever met a real writer, though strangely enough one of the first things Richard said to me was “When we were young, the older writers were all very remote and regal, but now we are completely available to the young.”

I called Mr. Howard and he laughed a bit insultingly (or was it just nervously?) and said in a brisk, possibly peremptory tone, “Stand on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue exactly at two o’clock today and I’ll come hurrying past on the way to my shrink and effect a manuscript-lift.”

A bit stunned, I repeated the details just to make sure I’d—but Mr. Howard interrupted me and laughed and said, “Yes, that’s what I just said.” And he hung up.

At the appointed time I was standing on the corner (half a block from my new apartment) with the manuscript in hand. I was
wearing sawed-off blue-jean shorts and a maroon T-shirt. My hair was freshly washed and combed, but I wished I’d slept better and didn’t have such dark circles under my eyes. Suddenly I saw him whirling up the street at a fast clip in a cape, his bald head gleaming. He sized me up with a head-to-toe survey and a cocked eyebrow. I had no idea what sort of impression I made. I had already been going to the gym for three years by that point, long before most other gay men, and my body was certainly revealed by my tight clothes.

“Have you included your phone number on your manuscript?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s on the top page.”

“Now I have lots of things on my desk at the moment to clear up, but I can assure you I’ll have some sort of word for you about your work at the weekend.” Then he was off. A bit stupefied, I watched him rush uptown, my manuscript in his hand.

My novel was called
Forgetting Elena
and became my first published book, thanks to Richard (the only blurb on the back was written by Richard as well). It was (and is) mysterious, experimental, original. I’d become so frustrated writing plays and novels I thought would please other people that I’d finally decided to write something I would want to read. I thought, if I’m always going to be rejected, I might as well like my hated “child.” It was obvious, by perusing
Forgetting Elena
(which at that point was called
Something Valentine
), that I’d been reading Kafka and Beckett, though it wasn’t a pastiche of either of those great writers. I was fascinated by court ritual and had immersed myself in books by and about courtiers in Heian Japan—
The Tale of Genji
and
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
in particular. I’d read and reread Ivan Morris’s
World of the Shining Prince
, about Genji. I was also fascinated by Versailles under Louis XIV, and I loved W. H. Lewis’s book about it,
The Splendid Century
.

My book, however, wasn’t a historical novel. I’d written several chapters of it while vacationing on Fire Island in the Pines. The
rituals of gay men there—the afternoon swimsuit “tea dances” at the Botel next to the harbor, late dinners together at a cottage (the whole house propped up by stilts on the dunes) that a group of six or eight had rented together, the men’s return to the harbor at midnight for more stoned dancing till dawn—rhymed in my imagination with the rituals of medieval Japan or Versailles. In Japan sudden, sometimes brutal sexual encounters in the dark would erupt, just as on Fire Island the communal living would be punctuated by quick, thrilling fucks in the dunes at the “Meat Rack.” After the disco finally closed shop at dawn, beautiful, sweaty men would stagger off into the scrub brush between communities to have group sex. At Versailles no titles were used in conversation, though everyone was conscious of exact gradations in rank; in the same way on Fire Island penniless beauties and millionaire lawyers all laughed and made love together, all dressed in the same swim trunks or jeans and sandals. With no cars on Fire Island, everyone was reduced to hauling home his groceries in a kid’s red metal wagon over the raised, bumpy boardwalks.

As if this blend of court ritual and Fire Island communal living weren’t hard enough to grasp, I’d decided to have my first-person narrator be an amnesiac who’s afraid to admit he has no idea who he or anyone else is. Since he remembers nothing, the whole book is told in the present tense. The narrator is constantly building up and revising suppositions about what’s going on around him and where he fits in. I thought this was what we were all doing all the time: modeling our behavior on the expectations of those around us and the cues we were being fed. The self was a social self; at our core lay a reciprocity. Admittedly I was an extreme example of this adaptability. I was inspired by Erving Goffman’s idea that the self is defined through reciprocal role-playing—that life is theater.

Richard met with me a week later. He’d gone over the entire manuscript and corrected many errors in taste and diction. I had
inserted footnotes here and there, which he thought (correctly, I’m now convinced) drew too much attention to the text as a text and added an unattractively coy note. It provided the reader with an escape route out of the labyrinth of the book. Richard argued that the whole book couldn’t be called
Something Valentine
since, in fact, the narrator is wrong—he’s not one of the Valentines. Richard said the book was too short. I needed to add another long chapter of thirty or so pages, since a novel shorter than two hundred pages was impossible to sell.

I worked on the book for several months. My heart sank at the prospect of adding new pages since I’d composed the novel by instinct alone. It was as if I had tuned my dials to a certain frequency; once my mind started emitting the right hum, I knew I could proceed. I was convinced I’d written a wonderful book—but I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d done it. Richard didn’t overpraise me but in a businesslike way let me know that he thought it was worth rescuing. His practical manner gave me the courage to revise.

Once I’d finished the revisions he did no more than glance at them. I gave the revised, much longer novel to my agent, who submitted it to Robert Gottlieb, who was then head of Knopf. He took months and months considering it (which, I was later told, was quite uncharacteristic of him). Finally he rejected it, though at one point he’d seemed on the verge of buying it. He wrote, “I like high-class junk and junky junk—but this book isn’t junky at all.” I was confused. By that time I was living in Rome. I remember walking back from the American Express office beside the Spanish Steps, where I received my mail, and thinking that I wanted to commit suicide. I sobbed and said aloud to myself as I walked along, “I can’t speak! They won’t let me speak!” I sat down on a bench looking out over the ruins of the forum and thought that if God didn’t send me a sign, I’d just kill myself. At that point a handsome blond Roman came up and asked me if I
was all right. I decided to live at least long enough to have sex with him—he was obviously an angel.

Maybe my book was bad, I conceded, or too weird, but hundreds and hundreds of bad books were published every year. Anyway, it wasn’t bad. It was good. I felt that all I’d ever wanted was to be a published writer. Now I was thirty and nothing was working out. I felt humiliated. Gottlieb went on to edit the
New Yorker
and to write with lyricism and insight about Balanchine. In the late 1980s, in Paris, I was introduced to him several times, and mutual friends told me I was all wrong about him, he was a great defender of the arts, poor man—he’d suffered for his exquisite taste. Now that I’ve become someone to whom other people submit manuscripts, I know there must be at least a dozen young writers out there who detest me for not helping them enough. One of them has started savaging my books in print. He wrote, “Edmund White is the fattest, ugliest writer in America, rivaled only by Harold Bloom.” He asserted that all my books were failures, including my biography of Jean Genet—a subject, he said, I’d spoiled for a whole generation.

Richard Howard, back then when I first met him in 1969, suggested my book be sent to Anne Freedgood at Random House, even though that publisher had already rejected it once (as had twenty-some other publishers). Richard called Anne and told her she must accept it. She did, but only after waiting many more months. I’d finished and revised
Forgetting Elena
by 1969 after three years’ work; it was published in 1973—seven years from start to finish for a book of two hundred pages. When I was back in New York, and Mrs. Freedgood and I had lunch to discuss revisions (more revisions!), it suddenly dawned on me that my agent had submitted the old manuscript to her, not the one I’d rewritten under Richard Howard’s direction. I asked to look at it; yes, it was the old dog-eared text. I realized the agent had been sending out the wrong version all along.

Anne liked the revised text when she finally received it a few days later, but she still insisted that the book couldn’t end so vaguely. I, who’d been so impressed by the abstract expressionist painters at Cranbrook, had wanted to create a verbal equivalent to those nonrepresentational paintings. Or rather, I knew that language (unlike strokes of paint) was symbolic and that nonsense syllables or strings of meaningless words à la Gertrude Stein would be tiresome to read. The trick, I thought, would be to write real sentences and to seem to be heading somewhere but to have the action keep canceling itself out—something I soon realized John Ashbery was doing in poetry. But Anne Freedgood said that in my novel I was entering into a contract with the reader; I was promising a mystery and I must deliver the payoff at the end. In the end, the book was widely reviewed as a mystery. How frustrating for true devotees of the genre!

But I’m getting ahead of my story. Before I went to Rome and before the book was accepted, Richard and I had become inseparable. He was always affected and pedantic and arrogant, but somehow these qualities, so tiresome in other people, were delightful and refreshing in him. He generated a kind of constant brio, as if he possessed many motors and they were all fed by the highest-octane fuel. Every moment with him had a sense of occasion. I felt that I was leading my usual backwater life when suddenly a pleasure boat would roar into view, its decks brilliant with guests in evening clothes. Except there was no way not to notice Richard. Richard wasn’t putting on the prevailing upper-class manner or the American version of a donnish style; he was inventing a whole new way of talking and moving and laughing. He spoke in a high, nasal voice with an elegant stutter, yet he was groping not for words but for rhetorical effect—for emphasis, surprise. He didn’t have an English accent, nor the “mid-Atlantic” one so popular in New York in those days, but rather something
that seemed to correspond to his idea of how Henry James might have talked—with elaborate grammar, odd word choices, sudden boutades, and an eerie emphasis on ordinary, everydayish words. He had a stylized way of throwing his head back, of holding a hand frozen in the air like Jupiter hurling a thunderbolt. He could cock an eye to devastating effect and raise an eyebrow in lofty disdain. His laugh was warm and encouraging, but theatrically so. Then once in a great while he’d have a little, humble smile, as if he’d caught himself being such a camp.

He was a great source of information on the eccentricities of his friends and acquaintances (he had a well-stocked memory, and if it ever failed him, he would strike his forehead lightly with his fist, as if to startle the mechanism back into functioning). But whereas Henry James wanted to be a gentleman and worried about any irregularities in the lives of those around him, Richard gloried in the strange, both in himself and others. He wore a red cape and many of his clothes were flashy or funny. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the effect he was making—he just wanted to be making one.

Richard could be harshly impatient if one “failed” him in some way—if one hadn’t read George Meredith’s
Diana of the Crossways
or if one said one didn’t “get” Gerard Manley Hopkins. He would roll his eyes, looking for help, possibly divine intervention. He’d whisper, “Oh, darling, how can you say such a thing?” For him the pantheon of great artists and writers and composers included almost everyone I’d ever heard of, past or present. No friend was allowed to have blind spots or preferences (though later he wrote a book of poems called
Preferences
). He was finishing in those days
Alone with America
, his thousand-page tribute to forty-one living American poets; I’d heard of only five or six of them (though later I came, through Richard’s good offices, to read and even meet many of them). He admired his forty-one “immortals” extravagantly, but he could treat them with a strangely sadistic edge. I remember
when he introduced the bibulous Alan Dugan at the venerable YMHA (where T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas had read). Dugan has largely been forgotten, but he had won the Yale Younger Poets award and later the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for slim volumes austerely named
Poems I, Poems II, Poems III
, and so on. Richard said, “Alan Dugan is a souse, in the original sense of the word as ‘salt,’ ‘source,’ ‘spring.’” For several years Richard had been a lexicographer, and these bizarre, sometimes shaming verbal associations would crop up in his writing and conversation.

At the same time that he was writing these admiring if edgy essays, he was constructing his own poems. When I first met him, he was working on
Untitled Subjects
, a collection of dramatic monologues à la Browning about Victorians. The best one was “said” by Mrs. William Morris as in old age she went through a box of memorabilia: “These are mine. Save them. / I have nothing save them” were the solemnly beautiful last lines. He would recite these poems at full volume and with great hamminess to Marilyn and Stanley and me. He overarticulated, spun on his heel to stare at us, banged on a table, sank into a long dramatic pause, tilted his head back and closed his eyes and whispered something prophetic before expiring on the chair behind him. The three of us, sitting in my little living room in my new, chic apartment on West Thirteenth Street, were terrified we’d surrender to torrents of weeping laughter, though I’m sure Richard would have interpreted our
fou rire
as exactly the response he’d been angling for. Richard confided that Sandy, his lover, had carefully rehearsed him and taught him his reading style. Privately we wondered if Sandy’s wasn’t a poisoned gift.