The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  “Oh, I see I awakened you. This is Max Richards—I presume that name means something to you?”

  “Hi, of course, Butler—”

  “I see it does.” There was a little burst of laughter, not Richards’s, and I realized he must be playing to an admirer. “It appears you have something to show me?”

  “Well, I have some stories, a novel, and now I’ve started a new novel—”

  “I want to see it all. But let’s start with the finished novel, not with the œuvres complètes. Do you have a typescript at your house?”

  “Yes, Mr. Richards, I’d be delighted to stop by—”

  “No need for that. I’ll be heading uptown today at one to have lunch with Lee Krasner? Jackson Pollock’s widow? And then to see my shrink. Do you think you could be standing at the corner of Horatio and Eighth Avenue, on the southwest corner, at precisely twelve-fifty, with the manuscript in hand?”

  “Of course, Mr. Richards, I’ll be there.”

  “I realize it’s only an hour and fifty minutes away. Will that give you time to do your toilette and, as the young say, ‘get your day on the road’?” Again, the appreciative chuckle in the background.

  “Sure, plenty of time,” I said, now more relaxed.

  “Very good. Then I’ll count on you.”

  Suddenly I was holding a buzzing receiver in my hand.

  If I’d had a dog I would have waltzed it around the room, so exultant was I. I instantly called Butler. “Am I disturbing you?”

  “Well, if I sound funny it’s because I’m doing a full facial wrap. You take these plantain leaves—”

  “Max Richards just called me. I’m going to hand him my manuscript on the corner in two hours.”

  “Sounds very Goldfinger. He probably wants to see what you look like before he commits himself to a full evening.”

  “Precisely. What should I wear?”

  “Angora sweater and Dacron pedal-pushers?”

  “I thought pasties and micro-skirt, perhaps the lamé? Oh, Butler, I am thrilled. Maybe my luck is about to turn and all thanks to you.”

  I put on sneakers and no socks, my tightest blue-jean shorts and an unironed grey T-shirt. I was reeling in a Breughel peasant dance of signifiers. At thirty was I too old to be dressed so trashily? Would I look a Village vagrant, part of the great lost tribe of actor-singer-dancer-waiters, baker by night, novelist by day? Or would I come off as a pathetic hustler, pushing the body because the work was feeble, one of the superannuated downtown sex symbols? Certainly I’d never have worn the same clothes if my manuscript drop had involved a straight man. Nor a gay man my own age. But I knew that Max Richards was a decade older than me and I, who’d had so little experience seducing older men, made the coarsest assumptions about them. And yet, as Maria had once said, “It’s terrible how your most cold-hearted, cynical predictions usually turn out to be true.”

  I stood on the corner at the agreed-upon time near a hardware store and across from a dreary 1960s apartment block called the Van Gogh. Down the street I could see a man with a gleaming bald head rushing toward me. He seemed to have on a plaid cape—yes, it was a Sherlock Holmes Inverness cape with a panel that floated behind, so aerodynamic was he. “The young author, I presume,” he called out, extending his hand while he was still ten paces away, speaking with a gusto that sounded mocking to me only because I wasn’t sure I was either young or an author, although I’d been one and aspired to become the other.

  I gave him my free hand, which he shook. In a theatrical way Max looked me up and down. He jerked his head in that strange gesture Greeks use to mean “yes.” I imagined that what he was miming was the judgment, “Well, you’re certainly a minor star, enough to conjure with, but your way of serving yourself up is rather tacky, isn’t it?” If most Americans dissolved all their messages in a corrosive bath of laughter and tepid smiles, a compulsion to chatter vapidly and make feeble jokes, Richards appeared, on the contrary, as pointed as those shards of glass embedded on the tops of city garden walls to prevent pigeons from strutting along them. No aimless billing here, his personal style announced, and no sleepy cooing. Nor was he afraid of acting in a preposterously legible manner worthy of a silent film actor.

  “I’m so pleased you have the time to look at my work,” I said.

  “One never has the time,” he declared, with a horrible smile, “but one must make it. When I was starting out none of my elders would receive me. Now, fortunately, all our doors are open to all of you. Which, of course, is exactly as it should be.” A frown and a little self-approving nod had replaced the smile, as though he were listening to his own words and judging them to be unexpectedly true. I had become nothing but a monument to gratitude, all long, exposed legs and humble smiles, someone as eager to offer up my spirit as my body.

  Suddenly he glanced at his gold wristwatch. “I’m off!” he shouted as he seized my manuscript and headed uptown. I felt as useless as the little village girl in her Sunday best after she’s handed her flowers to a general.

  Three days later Richards phoned, waking me up again. “Your book has some extraordinary things in it and I’m certain it’s publishable, but we must work on it. I’m not afraid of work—are you?”

  “No,” I burbled, “I long for nothing more—”

  “I see I’ve awakened you. Very good. Are you free tomorrow at five?”

  “I’m always free.”

  “You are?” He laughed wickedly, as though he’d just discovered me in a compromising position. “But the vagaries of your personal life engage me not at all; I’ll be the midwife to your art.”

  “Midwife or progenitor?” I asked.

  He laughed on a different frequency, as though to say, “Touché.”

  HE LIVED in a sumptuous modern building called the Trafalgar which, though it was in the Village, was guarded by a doorman and was suspended over a series of inner gardens. I walked up two steps and down three as I passed tinkling indoor fountains in the spacious lobby and headed toward the elevators.

  My patron was at his open door. His study was brightly and cheerfully lit, as though against the gloom of the other rooms and the darkness gathering outside. Max offered me a white-wine spritzer; the soda water shot out of a pale blue siphon caught in a wicker net. A little bar, comprised of bottles of Scotch, vodka and gin, red and white wine as well as the siphon, was poised on a mirrored tray, which threw up a gleam onto Max’s face as if from footlights.

  His head was Mussolini’s: the same shiny bald pate, the same full, fleshy face, the same orbits for eyes, the same carnal nose and square jaw. A sculptor would have needed a large, round, flawless piece of grey marble, the unveined kind that takes a high polish, to do a portrait bust that would have done justice to the monumentality of Max’s head, for even though his face was pink and his skull nearly white, only finely chiseled grey stone frozen into a look of ironic surprise would have rendered the contradiction of a presence that was both elemental and exquisitely human and humorous. The flesh and bone reality conveyed the contradiction through the speed with which his expressions changed.

  Max’s voice, a heldentenor’s, was pitched too loud, given my proximity, but I had the impression he was playing to a shadowy gallery behind me, rank upon rank of the great writers and artists of the past. Even during that first conversation I was aware that if he was tireless in his schemes to coerce the imaginations of his contemporaries, his only real witnesses were the dead. As we picked over my manuscript, which he’d annotated in his microscopic hand, he kept referring to “the Master,” who I realized must be Henry James, except that he spoke of him as though he were still living and about to knock discreetly at the door. Max was full of pronouncements: the three great literary gigglers in history, he affirmed, were Proust, Kafka and Ronald Firbank, all of whom would become so convulsed with laughter when reading out loud that they couldn’t go on. Most creators, he told me, were despicable people, twisted or infantile, and the only exceptions were Chekhov and Verdi—“th
e two most affable men who ever lived.”

  He clearly thought he was living after the Fall, in a bronze or brassy age far separated from the silver or golden epoch that had so fiercely captured his imagination. Even his own school years he looked back on with nostalgia (to heighten this effect he exaggerated his age, which was not yet forty). “These students today are unbearably lazy; yesterday I had to dress down that pack of barbarians I baby-sit at the Columbia Graduate School of the Arts” (I noticed he gave the full prestigious name of his department even as he disparaged its students). “When I was an undergraduate—before the Punic Wars—Lionel Trilling had but to mention an author, ancient or modern, for me to go running out to look up all his works and to devour them. But I wasn’t exceptional. We took our own education in hand and sought energetically after more and more titles; today the kids try to do as little as absolutely possible. What they cannot understand is that art is a form of discipline; as Gide said, writing a novel is solving a thousand little problems. Shall we solve a few more?”

  His corrections to my novel were all judicious and practical. At one point, well into the book, I’d added an asterisk and a footnote to the effect that the starred word was almost impossible to translate since the original term stood for an aesthetic concept that had no equivalent in our language. Max struck this. He appreciated the hint that the novel now in the reader’s hands was translated from an obscure language, a further complication of what was already a cat’s cradle of meaning, but he pointed out that by pinning down one definite meaning I’d actually reduced rather than increased the sense of mystery. “Besides,” he said, “there’s something too exuberantly sophomoric about it in what is otherwise such an austere and rigorous book. Beckett made the same sort of error of formal taste, if you will, in Watt, the last book he composed in English before he switched to French and the first person and the purity of the trilogy.”

  How thrilling, I thought, to share an error with Beckett.

  On nearly every page Max also corrected a fault in “diction” I’d made. I was astonished by his knowledge of the intricacies of the language—indeed of language tout court, since apparently he knew so many. He explained that he’d spent many years reading dictionaries.

  But in fact any explanation of his energy and brilliance seemed a form of modesty on his part, since to reduce such a floodlight of intelligence to a pinpoint of motivation actually belittled it. He knew everything, at least everything about the classics, about the Victorians and about poets of every era in every language. His contacts with music were extensive but naturally, in so literary a being, were concentrated on opera. Painting he knew as well; he ransacked the Renaissance for poetic subjects. Some of his best poems (including one that he would later dedicate to me) were either descriptions of paintings or the ongoing correspondence between a Da Vinci and a Medici.

  His criticism of the great writers of the past was uniformly ecstatic. If Butler could barely get up to five authors on his list of favorites, Max wouldn’t have been able to reduce his enthusiasms to five thousand. No matter whom I mentioned—Tennyson, Edmund Gosse, Cavalcanti, Lucretius, the Brownings, Bunin—his face lit up as though I’d just alluded to an old friend to whom he wished me to convey his warmest greetings. Nor was his encyclopedic knowledge a matter of bluffing. Although he constantly lectured everyone about the art of “erasure” (whatever that was), nothing he’d ever read seemed to have faded from his mind. He remembered whole passages from hundreds of novels, thousands of poems, and discussed them with a rapturous delight in their turns of phrase and narrative strategies. His study walls were nothing but books packed together so tightly that I feared if he removed one the whole room would tumble down. He was constantly lending or buying me books because he was thrilled to have another mind to form, even such a clouded mind too old to be satisfyingly impressionable. I didn’t want to have opinions, not as he did, since I had a priest-like respect for my own inner chaos. It seemed to me that whatever I’d written of value had emerged out of this fermenting mess; to clarify it, I was convinced, would kill it.

  Like other New York Jewish intellectuals of his generation, he was an Anglophile, more likely to have read Graham Greene and Angus Wilson than James Gould Cozzens or William Goyen. He distrusted most actual living English people, however, and warned me that they were very cheap, always cadging free meals and moving in on one and refusing to leave. “Oh, no, dear, don’t pay any attention at all to what he says, not that we can decipher the least syllable given his woof-woof way of mumbling and never finishing a sentence and simply gurgling when he’s had his fifth whiskey at one’s expense,” he told me after we ran into a visiting professor from Oxford. “They never wash, you know. And they’re all frightfully anti-Semitic. They think of us as colonial idiots and don’t realize that the balance of power, especially in the arts, changed forever after the war.”

  He was predisposed, nonetheless, toward the English literary milieu of the fairly recent past and referred familiarly to the emotional tangle created by Isherwood, Auden and Spender and had a firmer grasp on the intimate lives of the Bloomsbury writers than he did on those of his own friends. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves never struck him as absurd, not even her decision to have all of her characters speak alike and the children to sound like the adult Woolf herself. He had a large tolerance for the tiresome sea descriptions.

  If I hazarded the least rebuke to anyone in his pantheon his face would arrest its eager, playful mobility and freeze into a mask of disdain. He was skillful at arching just one eyebrow and turning his face into three-quarter profile, both to illustrate his recoiling from such ignorance and to render more graphic the unique, serpentine design of that solitary, disparaging line.

  If his disapproval was sudden and glacial, his ways of endorsing a friend who shared his taste were manifold and warm. When I was expressing ideas to his liking he’d let our allotted time together spill over into the following hour, like the dentist-friend who pushes back the next appointment in order to worry over the familiar molar another ten minutes and indulge in some one-sided chat echoed by gurgling sounds of pain or idiotic assent.

  His life away from me was never a mystery since he always gave me an exact report of where he’d been and where he planned to go. Meetings with a French editor, lunch with von Hofmannsthal’s great-niece (“Such a saftig woman, one could hardly say she was ohne Schatten”), tea with a translator—and then there were the young: all those young men with manuscripts. One night we came down from Max’s apartment and there, on the street, waiting by appointment, standing in the drizzle, was a young poet, collar turned up, unshaved, eyes burning, lips pale, manuscript in hand. Perhaps because I was there watching, Max was even more arrogant than usual. “No need to linger about,” he said to the poor poet, “I’ll give you my—oh, to such a pale, handsome face, what could I say except my verdict—in a week.” Hearing in so much angular, rapid verbiage the highly familiar word handsome, le beau ténébreux smiled divinely and stepped back into the night.

  Unlike me, Max lived mainly in a heterosexual world and he had intense, chiding relationships with women, who were usually intelligent, occasionally beautiful, always artistically talented. “Poor June,” he’d say, “she’s so brilliant and so lost, mainly because of her fatal attraction to fame. Have you ever heard of her falling in love with a nobody? And fame, alas, is built on obsessive work and, once achieved, promotes egotism of the most chilling sort—neither quality exactly conducive to happiness in love.”

  He never hid from these friends that he was homosexual; he even pointed out to them that his fifteen-year-long marriage to Keith was the only enduring union amongst their acquaintances. When he said “marriage” he was merely honoring the sense of permanence and duty and trust that reigned between them. He certainly wasn’t referring to any vulgar male-female role playing. He and Keith were of the same age and they were equally assertive or at least controlling, Max as the darting dragonfly of literature and Keith as its exquisite
corpse. Max gave an unending series of lectures, introductions, readings and broadcasts. He could be counted on to review or write a recommendation for virtually anyone, but his availability did not ensure a permanent ardor. No, he prided himself on what he called his “nuanced” judgments and his fellow poets responded queasily when he offered to champion them. I once heard him introduce a writer as a “souse—in the root sense of source and resource, of immersion and brine.” The red-nosed Midwestern poet stumbled to the podium and muttered, “Thanks, Max. I guess.”

  I didn’t mind when Max was nuanced at my expense, since I wasn’t sure I wanted to be an intellectual, at least not of his sort. I was dazzled by his generosity—his catholic tastes, his absorptive and retentive memory, his curiosity about everything, his arch but bountiful conversation— but unlike him I retained ideas, not names, citations and dates, nor did I want to be entirely at home in any world.

  During that first work session together, however, I had not the slightest criticism of Max to make. He was the one doing the criticizing. He held my life between his hands—my book!—and as I turned the pages and he explained to me the scores of small changes he’d made, I felt the way a parent must feel toward a pediatrician: fearful, grateful. When it was all over I smiled a broad smile of relief. As the wet autumn night drew in outside, I was intensely aware of Max’s office as an island of light in all that darkness. His bulldog, Ricardo, wheezed disgustingly in the corner, snuggling further into a dirty, cushioned nest. “We call him the Humidifier,” Max said. I was thrilled by Max’s surgical expertise and the cozy room and the sense that we were two writers working together.

  My pleasure increased a day later when I began to read the volume of his poetry that he’d given me, fine verbal marquetry patterned out of all the words he’d read and remembered, for in his poems he re-created real historical men and women and put dramatic monologues into their mouths. None of the detritus of a life was eliminated or stylized; no, he gave us his heroes, wardrobes and all, nor did he spare us a single horsehair sofa or the least antimacassar dimmed by brilliantine. Here were the roll-top desks, the basement kitchens with the wood doors of their giant, cream-colored iceboxes, the patent cough pills, shoe stretchers and salves for piles. Through the stereopticon of Max’s poems the nineteenth century seemed proximate and glowing, since what he was showing us were the feelings of his characters, not always exactly ours but recognizable nonetheless, the same pale human feelings breathing under the jet jewelry.