by Edmund White
THE AUTUMN when we met was, in fact, the high point of Max’s literary life, although I had no idea that the glory he was reaping was so recent nor did he know then it would never be harvested again in exactly the same golden abundance. As the witness to his triumphs, I was unworldly enough to be dazzled and old enough to share his joy. Despite his posturing, his elaborate, bookish conversation, his determination to maintain a “high level of discourse” at all times, nevertheless he had his failings and sufferings as well. I didn’t like him because he suffered. No, I liked and admired him because he was someone who’d chosen to lavish all his vast energies and supreme intelligence on a literary style that even most other poets would have considered eccentrically passéiste. In those days people would have said he was busy “doing his own thing” (“pursuing my idiosyncratic enterprise” was Max’s translation), but that explanation would have amounted to a good-natured dismissal.
I was embarrassed by Max’s effrontery, especially in public places. He’d call out to a sleepy young waiter in a Village restaurant, “My good man, fetch us something iced and ambrosial,” and would go on to give him orders at once so peremptory and so obscure that the good man would freeze in his tracks, caught in the twin headlights of anger and confusion. Nor did Max say such things unconsciously, as a grandee might, but rather in full awareness and as a dare. I couldn’t roll my eyes, in collusion with the waiter, as I might have done during one of my father’s public tirades, since Max was acutely aware of my responses and, in fact, was playing to them.
Where he was vulnerable was with respect to his body and sex. If I told him how striking he was he’d puff his cheeks out and exhale like a Frenchman and claw at the air with one hand, then let it fall nervelessly, as though beating off annoying cobwebs. He had two entire sets of clothes, fat and thin, so used to gaining and losing weight was he. Whether he was losing or gaining, his eyes would never stop scanning the entire table. During lunch he ceaselessly inventoried who was eating what and what remained to be consumed. If he was in his gaining mode, his hand would move delicately, rhythmically over the table, conveying nourishment to his mouth, which never stopped both talking and munching for an instant. One night I saw him break up a ring of a meringue vacherin in the middle of the table and slowly, methodically ingest it down to the last, snowy shard. If he was losing weight, he smiled with the anorectic’s martyred pride when his friends began to complain that he was overdoing it and that he looked lined and unhealthy. “Really, Max, you’re far too thin. You’re going to become ill,” they’d say.
He believed that he’d have more and more success romantically the thinner he became. He didn’t understand that his age and baldness went better with a solid, stocky body. What was sexy (and admirable) about him was his brilliance, his conviction in delivering his opinions and his refusal to adopt an American-style masculinity, which would have been too close-mouthed and inexpressive to convey the range and subtlety of his ideas. Perhaps because he’d spent so much time in France he’d picked up a kind of masculinity composed not of silence but of intellectual domination.
He and Keith took turns reading out loud to each other three nights a week. “We’re working our way through Diana of the Crossways and it’s splendid, exhilarating stuff,” Max would tell me. If I asked who’d written it, Max would simply raise that magnificent eyebrow and leave it to me to discover the answer, which he considered too rudimentary to be pronounced.
If sometimes he treated me as a slow learner, usually he flattered and frightened me by treating me as an equal. “Of course we know the ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ by heart,” he’d say, “but that poor moron Ben didn’t recognize my allusion to it at all and simply scratched his head over my inverted word order, not seeing I was echoing Pound’s re-creation of Latin grammar.” In such moments perhaps half the time I smiled shyly and confessed that I, too, was as ignorant as Ben or whoever, but the rest of the time I blushed, nodded and rushed home to look up and acquire the knowledge he’d so flatteringly attributed to me.
Max started dating a sweet guy who made paper flowers and dealt in Tiffany lamps, someone I’d known for the ten years I’d lived in New York. His name was Silvio and he limped slightly and had a way of holding his head to one side and smiling; I imagined he’d spent his twenties at deafening rock concerts (I’d seen him often in the old Stonewall) and had learned to smile at no matter what people were saying to him over the din. I’d introduced him casually to Max when we ran into Silvio on the street and I’d been surprised that Max was taken by him. Silvio wasn’t an intellectual, nor was he beautiful, the only two objective assets that I could imagine appealing to someone so magnificent as Max. Suddenly I realized that powerful as Max might be in poetic coteries, he was just a bald middle-aged man “on the open market,” as I thought of it. Max wielded an influence only over other writers, but perhaps he wasn’t attracted to them. He’d said that homosexual couples were plagued by the “incest taboo,” a brotherly similitude that early on tranquilized desire, and that the only way to keep things hot was to search out “the Other” (his vocabulary was inflected by his years of undergoing a Freudian psychoanalysis and reading French Existentialism). Was Silvio “the Other”?
Although Silvio seemed charmed by Max’s attentions—the theater tickets, the jeroboam of champagne, the piles of paperbacks that arrived on his doorstep each morning as footnotes to Max’s lecture of the previous evening—he preferred silence and smiles, was allergic to the theater, drank beer, didn’t read. Max could conceive of no love that wasn’t pedagogical, but unfortunately someone who was truly Other didn’t want to learn.
It dawned on me that I was the guy who could make Max happy and that he liked Silvio only because I’d introduced them. Max had told me once how “beautiful” he found me. I knew he cautiously admired my talent (he was cautious because no one else shared his enthusiasm yet) and he’d promised to send my revised manuscript to a publisher. It had already been read and turned down by several more houses since I’d received that first rejection letter in Rome, the one that had made me want to kill myself. Now I was more resigned to waiting. I knew I was enough of a student to warrant Max’s playing the teacher with me, the only role that made him feel useful and appreciated, and enough of an equal to raise my affection out of the category of abject adoration. If I was not yet as culturally eager as he or Butler at least I was quick to absorb whatever I felt I could use. Though outside I shook constantly and bobbed my head when I was tense, inside everything poured very, very slowly. From Maria I’d acquired a patient certainty that an artistic career must be long and slow to come to fruition, although now that she was only two years shy of forty I wondered if she’d ever begin to show. Perhaps her nearly geological sense of time would be her undoing. And mine.
Even if Max fancied me, I wasn’t sure I could ever find him attractive. I loved his beautiful head, at once so sensual and intellectual, just as I could only admire—from the vantage point of my dirty little slum apartment with its camp bed and army of roaches, its heavily barred windows looking out on a pulsing, sun-struck screen of green leaves—the powerhouse Max’s study represented: mirrored, gleaming, book lined, perfumed with the smell of waxed wood, invaded but not submerged by a correspondence worthy of a minister of state. This study was the hatchery of his passionate, erudite poems.
Exhilarating as every meeting with him was, as he doused me in alternating showers of praise and mockery, I wasn’t ready yet to domesticate my sexuality and take him on as the useful older lover. I loved my wild white nights along the docks and in the back of parked trucks. I didn’t want to buy a joint subscription to the opera (even if I could have afforded it). I didn’t want to grow a little paunch and discuss Roland Barthes with the same man who was fucking me. I didn’t want to trade in my come-stiff jeans for tailored slacks with a “self-belt.” I didn’t want the patina of my dark feelings to be rinsed clean in a liquid polish of irony, learned humor and literary allusions. I didn’t want to be fa
ithful to a hairy body, a faux-maigre starved thin so often that the skin hung slack on the bones like wet woolens on a wire hanger. If I were faithful it would only be by becoming faithless: until now I’d always explored the unique mystery of each man I held in my arms and during sex I’d never thought about another; but if I was forced to sleep with the same man night after night I’d have to fantasize about all the others in order to stay hard. The prospect of that kind of disloyalty violated my code of bodily sincerity.
But in other ways I was well suited to love affairs or friendships with other writers. If most writers were hostile to one another, I was so different from them that I fascinated and never threatened them and they struck me as energetic if awkward stunt ponies. For some reason I wasn’t the least bit competitive, perhaps because I believed that creativity was incommensurable. Then again I probably was competitive but had acquired my mother’s reflex of “rising above” all base feelings.
And then for other writers I had a physical glamor with my drooping mustache, shoulder-length brown hair, huge eyes, slender, muscled body that set me apart, although my looks would have counted as beauty only in a literary milieu, where the standards were so low. Since I’d published nothing I was permitted to be handsome; by the time I became a known writer, ten years later, I was conveniently beginning to lose my looks. Even when I was thirty I wouldn’t have turned a single head among the serious cruisers on Greenwich Avenue, but at one of the literary discussions organized by the newly founded Gay Academic Union people nudged one another when I squeezed past them, heading for a vacant seat. In those days I had a white gauze musketeer’s shirt with leg-of-mutton sleeves and white drawstring laces up the yoke neck from the chest to the clavicles. The string was never drawn tight and looked as though it could be easily yanked even wider open. My torso inhabited that pale shirt like the blue updraft at the heart of a flame.
Butler convinced me to go to a gay consciousness-raising session. Twelve guys sat around someone’s living room. The topic that night was “coming out,” that is, not the moment when we first made love with another man but when we first let the people around us know we were gay. According to the rules (which we were assured were both “Maoist” and “feminist”), each participant could bear witness to his personal experience as long as he liked. No one could interrupt him or offer him advice since a CR session was the opposite of group therapy. Here each story was treated as invaluable political information (“the personal is political”), not as a neurosis to be outwitted.
At the end of the session we were encouraged to draw a lesson from all these testimonies and devise a corrective political action. We decided that we’d all suffered because in secondary school our teachers had provided us with no information about homosexuality; each of us planned to write his high-school biology lecturer, including a mild reproach and a serious recommendation, that he or she take up this important topic in a scientific fashion. I never did a thing—I was as indifferent to other people as I’d always been. I belonged to that group of gay men who lost all interest in the others the minute he left the club, the trucks or the baths; it was only by pious convention that I signed a petition deploring the fire that had destroyed the Everard Baths and burned to death dozens of the homosexual clients inside.
Lou, my old lover who’d moved from Chicago to New York at the same time as I did, was much more militant, even though he was now happily married to his second wife (an eccentricity he had to conceal from the Gay Activists’ Alliance). He’d tell me about “zaps” he and his friends were staging—sit-downs in front of the Suffolk County police station, for instance. Fire Island was in Suffolk County and the police thought nothing of crossing the bay at night in motorboats to raid our discos and to arrest men sucking cock down misty, lonely walkways at dawn, their eyes spiraling with acid, the only sound that of deer nosing open garbage cans, or the sharp gasp of an orgasm, or the heavy breathing of an overweight cop lurking in the underbrush….
Lou’s motives struck me as irreproachable, since his zaps allowed him to meet handsome, fearless younger gay men, to feel as young and rebellious as he looked (despite the fact he was over forty, married and the vice president of an advertising company) and to exercise his extraordinary gift for demagoguery. Of course I remembered when, ten years ago, we’d laughed at the idea of homosexual rights and said one might as well demand respect for safecrackers.
MAX, despite his arrogance, which came in fitful gusts that alternated with a touching insecurity, didn’t believe that he alone could keep me entertained. He invariably arranged for us to drop in on someone after dinner, old people who’d known Arshile or Maxim Gorky, younger ones who’d studied with Hannah Arendt or worked for Djuna Barnes. He introduced me to a charming man with Parkinson’s disease who assembled from their own writings collage-autobiographies of classic French authors. I met through Max a millionaire from Nebraska who edited a little magazine.
And one night we dropped in on Tom, the poetry editor of a famous magazine, which represented the wedding of New York glitz and sophistication to solid investigative journalism. Tom was allergic to cigarettes; since I was a chain smoker I’d have to sit on his windowsill, with the window pulled down to my knees like a transparent skirt, and smoke and talk outside (Tom had a hard time hearing me through the glass though he could see me smiling, fuming, gesticulating). In a little magazine I reviewed Tom’s collected poems, which, paradoxically, were seldom discussed because Tom wielded so much influence that poets were afraid to appear to be currying his favor. He was delighted by my praise, just as I was pleased to be published.
One evening Tom read me a verse play he’d written a decade before. On another he introduced me to an amateur boxer with a lisp who’d been a paid fuck-buddy for years; the boxer’s only passion was opera and he made annual pilgrimages to Bayreuth and Salzburg. He and Tom camped it up and laughed the bored, knowing laugh of the cultural consumer. But Tom wasn’t happy with him. They’d become too comfortable in their joking remarks on the leading sopranos of the day to engage any longer at night in fierce sexual combat; there was no way that sex and friendship could be made compatible—Max’s theory of the incest taboo. I can remember one night the boxer said, “I don’t like Beverly Sills. Her name reminds me of Beverly Hills.”
Tom replied without a pause, “Funny, you never had that objection to Victoria de los Angeles.”
Tom longed for true love with an intellectual inferior and physical superior, preferably with someone who spoke no English (and would thereby be immune to Tom’s only charm). Tom had been in Freudian analysis for twenty years and made sophisticated jokes about his treatment as about everything else (his parents, his lack-love life, his failing health). He was a famous wit, as dry as his own martinis, and I knew a joke was on its way when his eyebrows would rise above the solid black rims of his round glasses and his small body, swaddled in a tightly buttoned tan summer suit made by “the Brothers” (Brooks) and sporting a pastel rep tie, would begin to rock all over. Since his humor never overturned his preconceptions it didn’t take him or his listeners by surprise; no, it was a local affair, just a snarl in his mental traffic, not an accident.
One day Tom said to me, “I’m terribly embarrassed but I don’t know any of your books. Could you tell me some of your titles?”
“I could,” I said, “but that wouldn’t get you very far since all my books are still unpublished.”
“That must be very painful for you,” he said, and though I was ready to be miffed by any remark that came close to condescension, I could tell right away that he knew exactly the humiliation and frustration I was experiencing and I felt relieved, acknowledged. I was the youngest man at most of the parties I was attending now and at age thirty I was still able and eager to play the attractive student, but at the same time I was sure I’d soon lose my looks, my only entrée into this society, even if I’d written a perfect novel, as I judged it, a book at once intimate and impersonal, a closely woven web of signifiers that coul
d be mapped onto our everyday life, though only imperfectly—“God’s allegory,” as Dante scholars called it, referring to those Biblical passages that can be interpreted only partially, that have only a limited correspondence to reality, passages that refuse to be completely teased out and that strenuously guard the mystery of the concrete.
My secret pride, I felt, however, was vexed and sore to the extent it was based on something shadowy, an unpublished novel, which is like a song no one has sung yet, or a set of plans for a house that has yet to be built. I’d quit my job on a wager that I’d succeed as a novelist. I’d deformed my personality just as a ballerina bloodies her feet or as a nun shaves her skull—always on the wager that one is going to become a star, a saint, an artist. My deformations were less dramatic than the dancer’s or holy sister’s, perhaps, but they were pursued just as fatally. Someone proposed I write for a television soap opera at a fee of a hundred thousand dollars a year, but I would have had to live on the head writer’s estate on Cape Cod and turn out two hours of dialogue a week. I convinced myself that I was too pure (too artistic, idealistic) to accept, but in fact I was too addicted to sexual adventure of the sort only New York could provide.