The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Eddie, who was almost a decade older than Joshua, liked to fuss over Joshua’s fragile health (“Sit over there in the high-backed chair, there’s a bit of a draft hitting the loveseat, though why I’ll never know, must be the churning of angels’ wings”). Eddie also upbraided him for his laziness (“At least I have some laurels to rest on,” Eddie said, “whereas your mere two titles are rather scant foliage, though dense enough, admittedly, to seat you comfily for life in the Harriet Smith Silverstein Cushy Chair of Renaissance Studies”).

  “Some of us have to work for a living,” Joshua stoutly called out, even if he was terribly hurt by Eddie’s harping on his slender output and the name of his absurd professorship. “Ah, yes, whereas I merely live to work,” Eddie replied.

  He always had the last word. Of a new Japanese painting he said, “It’s the usual swirls before pines.” When he came back from a trip to Asia and his first taste of opium, one of the ladies asked him if it caused impotence and he replied, “Poppycock.” The occasionally soggy puns in his conversation and his sometimes tedious adherence to all forms of parlor games were five-finger exercises for the flashy word play and formal trickiness of his long poems, in which virtuosity was always transposed up a note into wisdom. No wonder he liked French piano music, which at its best kept the same proportions of parody, parlor fun and stabbing beauty.

  “How can he be so cruel?” Joshua asked me. “Teasing me about my output, when he knows I suffer terribly from writer’s block. And of course I could point out that teaching is grueling work, not that he’s ever had to think about work. The other day when I told him I’d received a raise and was now earning fifty thousand dollars a year, I might as well have been discussing shekels or drachmas. He blinked and said, ‘Is that considered a lot?’ ”

  Although I’d read little contemporary poetry since university days, Joshua was immersing me in it again. Most of the time I found it tedious and obscure and I thought it kept its prestige partly because of its ceremonial past and partly because it took so little time to read and to write—a perfect medium for dilettante writers and theory-spinning critics. Each page of a novel could be just as well written word by word as a poem—a novel was six hundred sonnets. For a poem’s formal ingenuity, the novel could substitute a far more gripping plot.

  But Eddie was a genius who corralled into the sacred paddock of poetry his irreverent social tone and his sense not only for how things look and taste and smell but also for how they wriggle and crawl and soar. On the page his puns and acrostics and palindromes, even his calculated written-out stuttering, were so freighted with feeling that I didn’t know whether to smile in acknowledgment of his skill or cry because he’d passed an electrode over the neurons in which my strongest emotions were stored. For if Max was concerned primarily with dazzling readers, even if that meant chilling them, Eddie wanted to play them, striking all their notes, the virtuosity his, perhaps, but the resonance entirely theirs.

  As a young poet he’d written bejeweled verse full of poetic props (swans, lutes), and his favorite poet of the recent past had been Amy Lowell. But to this overwritten, turn-of-the-century formula, which made the poet weep but left the reader dry eyed, Eddie brought a sudden new intensity generated by touching together the two least likely wires—autobiography and allegory. Everyone else of his generation, following Robert Lowell’s example, was beginning to write confessionally, with a new straightforwardness that felt as exciting as sin after years of the monastic discipline of impersonality imposed on poets by Eliot and the New Critics. They were the theorists who’d believed that a poem was “objective” and could be read—or written!—in exactly the same fashion in Oshkosh or Johannesburg, in 1800 or 1950. Eddie’s early poems had conformed to this austere ideal, but now he was slowly inserting his life into his work—with this difference, that he couldn’t resist allegorizing even his own parents’ divorce, which instantly became a quarrel between Mother Earth and Father Time, a marriage on the rocks.

  Joshua was uniquely qualified to understand this kind of autobiography. If he would have been titillated but left speechless by shocking personal revelations, Eddie’s approach, which harked back to Dante’s La Vita Nuova, reconciled the Renaissance with the second half of the twentieth century. Dante had alternated exalted but abstract sonnets with short, straightforward prose paragraphs narrating his various meetings with the historic Beatrice in the streets of Florence. Eddie melded the poetic and the prosaic, the symbolic and the literal, the religious and the frivolous into verses that glowed as though the glassblower had just pulled them out of the furnace, puffed and twisted contrasting colors into shapes, then pinched them off and set them aside to cool.

  Since I’d studied Chinese at the university I should have been used to the idea of generating endlessly proliferating commentaries on the classics, but something in me was alternately scandalized and charmed by so much of Joshua’s careful, resourceful attention being focused on just a few lines of poetry. I don’t want to suggest that I was a free spirit, an artist, and that Joshua was “dry” and “pedantic” just because he was employed by a university and I wasn’t. On the contrary, my skepticism about Joshua’s work was a bit philistine, whereas Joshua’s method was anything but mechanical. No idea was driven into the earth and no theory was allowed to crowd out intuition, his intuition, which he began and ended with and to which he remained faithful.

  Joshua and I would eat our green beans and rare steaks, our “diet food,” at Duff’s on Christopher Street while downing a bottle of white wine. From there we’d go to the Riv and drink two stingers each, a sweet concoction of white crème de menthe, brandy and vodka. Often I’d accompany Joshua home and in his charming floor-through in Chelsea we’d talk till dawn about poetry over “splashes” of brandy on the rocks while listening to LP records of the music Balanchine had choreographed—Stravinsky’s Agon, Hindemith’s Four Temperaments, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. Our conversation would skip lightly from a discussion of the Wordsworthian Solitary to Elizabeth Bishop’s old fisherman in “At the Fishhouses” (“There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. / He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty / From unnumbered fish with that black old knife / the blade of which is almost worn away”). Or Joshua would show me a recipe in Marcella Hazan’s cookbook he wanted to try out. Or I’d tell him about my strategies for seducing Kevin. One night we fell drunkenly in bed together but I didn’t want to be Joshua’s boy. I guess I wanted to be his equal, his friend.

  Joshua was clearly in love with me. At the door he’d cling to me a second too long and his lips would open when we’d kiss. I felt that he’d been waiting all the long, long evening just for this moment. I resented his insistence on this tribute, his “due,” which in my eyes invalidated his professions of friendship whereas to his mind love was the natural overflow of so much laughter, so many shared secrets. Whereas I was willing to tell anyone everything about my sex life, I was reluctant to confide my ideas even to my closest friends, not because I was proprietary about what lawyers call “intellectual property,” but because, well, I scarcely ever had carefully defined ideas and, as a novelist, I was more likely to form an idea in a dramatic context I’d invented, in a conflict between two characters, than in the abstract. But with Joshua I felt the need to share with him all my half-baked ideas, except those about a sexual temperament that excluded him.

  He knew that often after I left him I’d hurry off to the bars, which were slowly migrating farther and farther north, from the Village up to Chelsea, and farther west, from residential areas into the meat-packing district and on over to the docks. He saw my sexual energy as a force unattached to a specific object—why not attach it to him? He must have known that I would willingly have grappled with him in the hold of a parked truck in the dark at five in the morning—why not now, here in the hallway after the most wonderful conversation?

  The irony was that when Joshua pleaded with me, he used the same arguments I advanced in trying to seduce Kev
in. Because I was more abject than Joshua, because I’d already suffered through six years of hopeless love with Sean, I’d already heard all the arguments—from my own mouth—and I knew just how useless they were. As a consequence I was never angry with Kevin, just wounded or humbly patient (even more tedious for him, no doubt). But Joshua was frequently exasperated with me, since we had all the elements between us to create the “affair of the century,” as he said, if only I weren’t so hard hearted.

  Joshua was the best friend of at least six people I could name and I was aware that I could easily be replaced. As Maria had once muttered, “Practically anyone can be my lover, whereas it’s very difficult to be my friend.” I knew that Joshua—famous for his warmth, intelligence, sociability and refinement—was drawn to me because he loved me, not because I was especially worthy of his friendship. I complained often to Joshua of Kevin’s rejection of me so that he could see that I, too, suffered in love and that Venus dealt out her cruelty capriciously. Sometimes I’d picture myself to Joshua as a neurotic incapable of reciprocating affection, which was probably truer than I believed and less a permanent defect than I feared. After a whole evening of dissecting my spiritual faults, I’d achieved the unintended effect of talking myself into feeling miserable.

  I needed Joshua. I felt he was my first real ally in the world of cultured and powerful adults, these men and women who published reviews in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books, who traveled regularly to Italy and France and knew their intellectual counterparts in England. As a boy I’d said, Isn’t it strange that the writers of another era—Keats and Wordsworth and Byron—all knew each other, whereas writers today are isolated one from another. Now, from Joshua’s stories, I saw that I’d been wrong and that the proletarian author of a famous comic novel was no longer poor but dined at the Garrick Club with the author of a four-volume family saga, a minister of state and the head of a museum. I saw that the same names migrated from the TLS to the New York Review, that the writers all met one another in Manhattan or Nantucket or Castine or Key West, that the editor of one literary periodical was married to the editor of the largest book publishing cartel and that anyone who objected to such a coincidence was accused of “provincial paranoia,” for the great idea of all these dazzling New Yorkers and Londoners was that obscure authors and intellectuals stranded on remote American campuses or at red-brick colleges were burning with unfounded and farcical resentment.

  Joshua may have been incapable of driving a car or picking up a guy in a gay bar, but he was a shrewd navigator up the treacherous rapids of intellectual life. Through him I began to write “career-building” book reviews that were designed to win me friends in high places; he also kept me from looking like a fool in print. My Marxism, which could sound absurdly heavy handed and naïve if expressed in ready-made statements, became “sympathique” if turned into a lightly tossed off question. Joshua would hover over my typescripts with a pen quivering in the air like a barber’s shears already clicking before they come into contact with the client’s hair—and oops! he’d snip away an awkwardness, a smug bit of over-explanation, the incorrect use of while to mean whereas, a show-off digression, an overly explicit allusion, a gratuitous insult of someone I might need later. When he read through the new novel about Christa I was writing, he cut passages of what he called “aristocratic admiration,” that is, excessive hand-rubbing over Christa’s jewels or her thoroughbred profile. His censorship was less strategic than temperamental, since carping of any sort irritated him, bragging made him smile pityingly and only ardor—an ardent defense, an ardent espousal—engaged him fully. For instance, he liked my portrait of Christa because she reminded him of the ardent Dorothea in Middlemarch, his favorite novel. Best of all, he had the experienced teacher’s Socratic tic of correcting his wayward, bullheaded student by merely raising a polite question. Perhaps his awareness that I was putty in his hands everywhere except in bed only added to his chagrin.

  Oddly, despite his sense of how to maneuver he had a strongly romantic, idealistic nature, a Brahmsian composure and fortitude about the inevitable ache of beauty. In fact he liked to quote Wallace Stevens’s line, “Death is the mother of beauty,” in acknowledgment that what makes the beautiful heart-rending is our certainty that it is transitory.

  I wasn’t frightened by transience but by tepidness, the feeling that God was no longer taking pains but letting things go to seed. Chipped nails, sloppy proofreading, unreplaced burnt-out bulbs, received ideas, the unexamined life—these were the sources of my fear, as was any form of whistling in the dark if the dark didn’t have ears. When I was with Joshua this fear of sentence fragments, yellowing bed linen and unrenewed subscriptions was held at bay, since he insisted on taking those very pains God had recently been so carelessly neglecting.

  WHEN I ARRIVED at Joshua’s one evening Eddie was already sitting there. I’d been anticipating this first meeting for weeks—at last I was to be introduced to my idol’s idol, the man sensitive enough to appreciate my talent and rich enough to help me. Eddie had brought along a little package of things he could snack on. “It’s all feng and shui,” he murmured, “and wu wei and yang and yin.” Suddenly he raised his hands and shook them and said in a high-pitched voice, “Lawdy, Miz Scarlett, Ah don’t knows nothing ’bout macrobiotics …” Eddie avoided looking at me and when Joshua wandered into the kitchen searching for ice, Eddie subsided into himself, a grumpy display of deliberately cruel unsociability that Joshua, of course, would have admiringly chalked up to “shyness.”

  I was intensely uncomfortable. I knew that Joshua considered Eddie to be not only the greatest living poet in English but also our sole candidate for immortality. What’s more, Eddie was fabulously rich and had set up a foundation for handing out grants to deserving artists. He was meant to be witty and worldly, but with me he seemed like a snake curled into a ball, the only sign of life a flickering tongue, for he licked his lips like someone who takes amphetamines.

  He and Joshua referred to a new diet they were both going to try. Then they spoke about two of Eddie’s neighbors, a mother and a daughter, but there was nothing I could add.

  Finally Joshua “begged” me to read the first chapter of my Japanese novel, but we’d already conspired to spring it on an unsuspecting Eddie and so I just “happened” to have the manuscript with me. I read it in the deafening silence around me. Joshua’s eyes were swimming shut, although from time to time he sat forward in his chair, as though by putting himself in a state of precarious balance he could keep himself awake. Each time he lurched up out of sleep he smiled and pantomimed opening his eyes wide. From time to time I glanced over at Eddie to see his reaction, but he was nervously pressing the fingertips of one hand to those of another. When I’d finished the chapter he didn’t say anything. He just lowered his head at an enigmatic angle with a soft smile but no eye contact.

  “Jeepers! It’s late! I must fly,” I said, and within seconds I was at the door.

  “Dear heart!” Joshua murmured. “Lovely reading. I’m afraid I had too much Pinot Grigio.” Still seated on the couch, Eddie waved with that gesture of unfocused beneficence peculiar to royalty.

  I was devastated. Just at the moment I’d imagined I was about to win a word from the greatest writer of the day he’d refused to make even a single assuaging remark. I’d heard so much from Joshua about Eddie’s exquisite manners that I’d assumed that at least I could count on them. Faced by Joshua’s drowsiness and Eddie’s rudeness, I’d felt my chapter dying, as though it were a fish drying on the dock, flopping a few times, then going still.

  I wanted to die. I’d wagered that my life—humiliated, obscure, frustrated—would be redeemed through art, but now I could see that my novel would be despised or ignored, even by other queers, if it were ever published. I was on the curb as a taxi came hurtling by: I wanted to step in front of it.

  The writer’s vanity holds that everything that happens to him is “material.” He views everything from a di
stance and even when the cops arrest him for sucking a cock through a glory hole he smiles faintly and thinks, “Idea for Story.” As he submerges himself in the bilge of everyday life, all its disorder and tedium, he holds his thumb out at arm’s length and squints, as though to get a take on this patch of swarming nonsense. Each new occurrence offers a new end to the story, in the light of which everything that preceded must be revised.

  Now I saw the absurdity of this whole project. If I’d never really felt poor it was because I’d been inoculated by the sense that even being in want is “colorful” and in any event, viewed under the sign of eternity, merely an annoying detail. I was engaged in a conversation with earlier and later writers; our beacons were flashing one to another through the dark centuries: no longer. Now the diplomatic immunity granted by art had been stripped away, now all the normal rules applied to me. The lighthouses had been turned off.

  When I got back to my room I was so desperate for love or violence or just a transfusion of human warmth that I ordered up a hustler. In a gay paper I’d seen an ad for an escort agency. Now a deep, well smoked man’s voice was on the end of the line. He said in one breath: “Good-evening-Dreamboys-this-is-Harold-how-can-I-help-you?”

  “Hello. I saw your ad.”

  “And-you’re-looking-for-one-of-our-hot-young-guys-to-get-together-with-tonight?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Look, hon, give me your number and I’ll call you right back.”

  “Oh, I can hold on.”

  “No, it’s a security check. Just to make sure I’m not wasting my time with a crank caller.”

  When he called back I could hear him bathing the telephone receiver in the smoke of a filtered cigarette and I could picture his chemically streaked hair, his sterling-silver ID bracelet, his starched white shirt with the soiled collar open to expose a tuft of black hairs nestling like brambles around a pink-gold crucifix. “Now, tell me, what kind of young man are you looking for?”